BattleSnake


This isn't a DOS game I wrote 30 years ago, but a console engine I made this past weekend.

It's the classic game of Snake that many had on their Nokias (eat the apples, don't bump into yourself or the walls) but this version is "Battle Snake" with 4 snakes playing simultaneously against one another.

Rather than control the snake directly, my dev team will be coding their own strategy and Friday we'll be having a battle-royal to see whose strategy gets the most apples.

While it's a fun exercise it also captures some key concepts and challenges Software Engineers, especially RPA Engineers, often run into: iteratively anticipating and predicting state, simultaneously acting towards a goal while reacting to changing variables.

It's also a great analog to coding - with the trade off of complex but hard to maintain algorithms against simple but potentially incomplete approaches.

Can't wait to see how well they do.

The code is also available on GitHub if you want to try it with your own team.

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