M-U5K-3T: When Code Golf Meets Planetary Survival
Picture a dark room. The only light comes from a wall of displays and a blinking prompt that politely informs you:
“LINK TO M-U5K-3T: HIGH LATENCY – DIRECT CONTROL DISABLED.”
Perfect.
You are supposed to be a Rover Commander in the Musketeer Corps. Somewhere absurdly far away, you have an autonomous unit parked on a hostile exoplanet. It wants you dead, but it’s also covered in minerals that could fund a small civilization.
The ore on M-U5K-3T is everywhere. Unfortunately, everything else on the surface is actively trying to kill you.
So, we don't pilot. We script.
You aren't driving a car; you are designing a brain. You have to compress a complete survival strategy into a snippet of InterSystems ObjectScript, fire it into the dark, and trust that your logic holds up against radiation storms and rough terrain.
This isn't just exploration. It's a puzzle.
The Spark: Logs to Space Rocks
The idea actually hit me while watching—of all things—a reality show called Big Timber.
There was a crew salvaging loose logs from rivers instead of cutting down forests. They weren't creating resources; they were hunting for what was already floating there, relying on physics and timing.
I realized that’s exactly what a rover does. It doesn't manufacture; it salvages. It hunts resources in a hostile environment.
So I took that "scavenger" concept, swapped the river for a radioactive desert, and replaced the floating logs with rare mineral veins exposed by erosion.
The Tech: Three.js Meets ObjectScript
Visually, we built this using Three.js to handle the heavy lifting. We have two modes:
- Simulation (The Danger Room): A wireframe, Tron-like grid where you test your algorithms.
- Deploy (The Wild): The actual 3D rendering of the alien surface.
For the Danger Room, we hacked together a little ObjectScript-to-JavaScript transpiler.
It acts as the bridge. It takes your raw ObjectScript logic, translates it in real-time on every tick of the engine, and executes the rover's decisions. It records the entire "film" of the mission, which you can then replay in full 3D to see exactly where your logic failed (or succeeded).
Why Code Golf?
Why force the code to be short? Why not write a thousand lines of robust error handling?
Bandwidth.
In the lore of M-U5K-3T, data transmission across deep space is expensive and slow. This forces a trade-off between:
- Intelligence: You need complex behavior to navigate obstacles and manage fuel.
- Efficiency: You need to write that behavior using the fewest characters possible.
The rover is waiting. The latency is high.
So... how efficient is your code, really?
🕵️ Sneak Peek
Curious about the atmosphere on M-U5K-3T?
[Here is a quick look at the rover executing autonomous maneuvers](https://youtu.be/SiS8Z4jwXWc?si=6XiX5k3paUdmX5xf)
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