Tiger Game
This project is an adaptation on the Nepalese game of Bagh-Chal where 20 villagers attempt to corner one tiger Without exposing themselves and being "eaten". It was assigned to me as a sophomore in my data science and algorithms course as a competitive group project against 10 other teams of students and I was in charge of designing the strategy for the villagers. Our group won the tournament, largely thanks to our villager algorithm, which lures and compresses the tiger into a corner, securing the victory. The algorithm is dead simple and preys upon the fact any sophisticated tiger algorithm has to search for vulnerable villagers. It works like this:
- It first creates a staircase pattern along the left side, creating the free space to track the tiger
- Exposes a villager at the very bottom of the board as bait
- Stalls until the tiger makes it way down towards the bait villager
- Seals off the exit immediately after the tiger jumps the bait villager
- Aggressively compresses until the tiger is left with no legal moves
I wanted to showcase this project not because it is technically excellent but because it exhibits the project management principle of minimum viable product (MVP);
this project was assigned to me at a busy part of the semester and our team wanted to optimize our engineering resources to only build the features that would lead to us winning.
Before ever putting our hands on the keyboard we spent a lot of time analyzing the game mechanics to identify viable strategies and projecting the strategies our competitors would build so we could exploit them.
After identifying our niche in the market, we quickly went to work, leaving our customer (our professor) highly satisfied and beating out all other competitors.
Source code available here