The Coding Club held their first DU Slither event on Oct. 11, a coding competition for competitors to create an AI to play the club’s twist on the classic game of snake. DU Slither events are planned for each semester.
Snake is a single-player game in which a player directs an ever-growing snake to avoid obstacles while collecting fruit. For DU Slither, the Coding Club put together a head-to-head version, in which competitors’ snakes must avoid running into each other while gathering more fruit than their opponent before time runs out.
For this semester’s event, all four competitors’ snakes were set up in a double round-robin tournament. The matches were played on a projector while spectators cheered for their favorites and munched on pizza from Slivys.
It was a series of exciting bouts with a variety of different strategies in play. One player’s snake even used breadth-first search, an algorithm taught in Denison’s computer science classes.
When the last match was marked up on the chalkboard, the winner was clear: A snake known as Apex Fly, developed by Ben Nelson ‘28, took home victory.
Unlike the other snakes of the tournament, which focused largely on collecting fruit, Nelson’s snake went on the offensive, throwing itself in front of opponents, eventually trapping them in a corner where they were forced to run into an obstacle, which triggered an automatic loss. After multiple from-behind victories over opponents who collected far more fruit with much larger snakes, Apex Fly won all but one round. Congratulations Ben!
Coding Club’s president, Joel Singh ’28, considered the inaugural event a success and encouraged anyone interested to join the club to participate in the next DU Slither in the spring.
