CopyCat

What strategies should a computer opponent adopt in order to provide a challenge to the human player? Any fixed plan can eventually be learnt and then the game looses its excitement. The best opponents are those whose skills are equal to your own and then the trick is to become better yourself.

This project was mothballed early in its development. What was meant to be shown here is a small java applet with show a battle between two tanks, one with manual control, the other on automatic. The tank under computer control would starts with no knowledge of how to succeed. By observing the behaviour of its opponent it would try and mimic winning strategies.

The last version of the applet had a single manual controlled tank presented in 3D with a movable camera.

tank controls - cursor keys (up, down, left, right)
camera controls - keypad (2, 8, 4, 6, 7, 1, 9, 3, 0, period, +, -) and (a, b, m)

Unfortunately since then the applet has stopped working and has not been fixed. If anyone is interested in continuing the idea the existing code is available here