Linkrunner
Alright! This is a totally kick-ass theme (thanks, GirlFlash) and I’m glad to see lots of people running with it. Too bad I’m not one of them, though — this is just about the most straightforward Wikipedia-reliant game you can imagine. There are two players, a runner and a chaser, each of which starts out on a random page. It’s basically a game of tag with the chaser chasing the runner through article after article. The chaser moves faster, but the runner has complete freedom to duck into “Lists of Phoenician Rhetoricians” and hide all night, if they like.
It really just looks like a two-player browser, doesn't it?
While technically two-player, you can only (at the moment) play as the chaser against a simple AI runner — I’m currently trying to figure out how to adapt an existing bit of code that calculates the distance between two phrases (actually, my PhD project truth-be-told) into this without making you download ~80gigs of word-vectors.
Tags: wikipedia
I’m glad to see you doing this! I’ll be interested to see how the game plays out with an AI chaser… can’t wait to try it.
Cool Idea. I suppose AI Chaser would keep a long list of the last X pages the player visited and all links on these X pages (and perhaps links on the linked pages of these pages?)..
Still, I can’t help but feel that the runner has a huge advantage.
You’re right; the Runner had a huge advantage in my first iteration. But with a few tweaks (Chaser can move twice per turn, and the Runner can only follow short links (one or two words)) it balances out reasonably well. The Chaser’s AI just queries a web service to find a path from its article to the runner’s current, and then tries to follow that path. Since articles on Wikipedia are roughly grouped into islands (related topics tend to link to each other), you can stay ahead of the Chaser by constantly skipping from island to island.
Listen to me, I sound like a graph-theory researcher. Sigh.
Are you thinking of messing with some of the rule params outside of the original version of Wikipedia tag? I notice you’re sticking to the 2 Chaser moves vs 1 Runner moves and was curious since it should be easily tweakable to mess around with it in an automated fashion.
Another thing that might be neat if you get both chaser and runner working with AIs.. you could just have them battle it out…
I also excitedly let Jeremy know you were working on this and we’re both psyched to see the computer version. Staying tuned…
Cool! Obviously, since I’m shamelessly ripping the ruleset that you and he put together I won’t release it without permission. Hopefully y’all are ok with it though.
Yeah, the two-AI thing works, and is mildly amusing. If things go awry, the AI just picks a move randomly — if it goes entirely pear-shaped (e.g. parser failure or a dead end) it moves to a random article (Special:Random) instead of backtracking.