7.1 Measuring a robot (Eloquent JavaScript Solutions)

7-1 Eloquent Javascript Solutions.js

function runRobot(state, robot, memory) {
  for (let turn = 0;; turn++) {
    if (state.parcels.length == 0) {
      return turn;
    }
    let action = robot(state, memory);
    state = state.move(action.direction);
    memory = action.memory;
  }
}

function compareRobots(robot1, memory1, robot2, memory2) {
  let totalIterations = 100;
  let robot1Results = [];
  let robot2Results = [];
  for (let i = 0; i < totalIterations; i++) {
    let state = VillageState.random();
    robot1Results.push(runRobot(state, robot1, memory1));
    robot2Results.push(runRobot(state, robot2, memory2));
  }
  let r1a = Math.floor(robot1Results.reduce((a, c) => a + c, 0) / robot1Results.length + 0.5);
  let r2a = Math.floor(robot2Results.reduce((a, c) => a + c, 0) / robot2Results.length + 0.5);
  console.log(`Route Robot completed in an avarage of ${r1a} turns.`);
  console.log(`Goal Oriented Robot completed in an avarage of ${r2a} turns.`);
}

compareRobots(routeRobot, [], goalOrientedRobot, []);

Project: A Robot

7.1 Measuring a Robot

It’s hard to objectively compare robots by just letting them solve a few scenarios. Maybe one robot just happened to get easier tasks, or the kind of tasks that it is good at, whereas the other didn’t.

Write a function compareRobots which takes two robots (and their starting memory). It should generate a hundred tasks, and let each of the robots solve each of these tasks. When done, it should output the average number of steps each robot took per task.

For the sake of fairness, make sure that you give each task to both robots, rather than generating different tasks per robot.

Hints

You’ll have to write a variant of the runRobot function that, instead of logging the events to the console, returns the number of steps the robot took to complete the task.

Your measurement function can then, in a loop, generate new states and count the steps each of the robots takes. When it has generated enough measurements, it can use console.log to output the average for each robot, which is the total amount of steps taken divided by the number of measurements.