Demo AI with TAEB and try_explore part 1

TAEB ships with an AI known as Demo. one can use it as a reference for creating your own AI with TAEB. At its most simplistic level, the creation of a TAEB AI invovles the following steps:


1. Create a Perl module that inherits from TAEB::AI
2. Create a method called next_action that returns a an object of type TAEB::Action

I will be describing how next_action in Demo moves around the the Nethack dungeon via next_action sending the try_explore method. In TAEB's Demo AI, one of the actions that it can execute is defined by the try_explore method. From the current position in the Nethack dungeon, TAEB will use try_explore to find the next best tile to reach amount it's 8 nearest neighbors.

try_explore itself is merely a wrapper. The work is done first_match, which takes as an argument a type of the destination tile. In this case, the destination tile type is 'unexplored'. Tile types are defined in lib/TAEB/Util.pm from lines 73-91. first_match is part of TAEB::World::Path package. The purpose of first_match is to identify the type of data structure that will be used to search for the next tile position. Typically, for the purposes to try_explore this will be undef. After determining the type of data structure for searching, first_match calls _dijskstra, which is an implementation of the Dijkstra path finding algorithm.