vec(tor)-rac(ing)

This is a simulation of racers on a grid containing a racetrack with walls beside it. Each turn, a racer can accelerate one unit in one of the cardinal directions or can do nothing. There is no friction. I myself did not come up with the game, which is traditionally played by hand with graph paper. My version features a randomly generated, infinite track and racers driven by artificial intelligence (a neural network). Racers improve through natural selection. A racer is scored primarily on how far upward it gets and secondarily on how long its race took.

Installation

You can clone the repository and build the program with cargo, or you can install the binary like this:

cargo install vec-rac

I suggest the latter method.

Running the Simulation

The program makes use of all available cores to find better racers, but doing so can still take a while; I suggest you run the program with optimizations on. When a new best racer is found, a movie is played of its accomplishment. I have not implemented saving of racers, so to record your progress, you should run the program something like this:

asciinema rec -i 1 -c 'vec-rac ...'

Asciinema is a separate program. The above command runs the command after -c and squashes pause times (when new racers are being generated) to at most one second. You can rewatch the progression this way.