POT by Steven Price

Slight update - fixed a bug with detecting when opponents drop packages on
the destination squares (although its impossible to know in certain
situations), and improved the package delivery code so that it doesn't change
its mind about which package to deliver half way there.

Contents of the old README follow:

Here's what you get with perl and too much free time on your hands.

The algorithm is quite simple, head towards the home squares in turn, pick up
packages when you come across them and take any packages currently being held
to their destination.
The path finding algorithm is dead simple - but a slight twist is that it
randomises the path found, so it doesn't always pick the same route, but will
always pick the shortest route (although the paths are only calculated once for
each destination). Hopefully this should avoid running into other robots too
much (because there's nothing in the code to interact with other robots).
Also my original idea of using different 'bids' was abandoned when I realised
that I really didn't have any idea when my command should be executed in
relation to the other robots, so its stuck at 1 now :)

Probably the best bit is the debugging code :) It produces a nice ASCII map
of the board, and puts in the position of everyone and where all the packages
it knows about are (but you need a big screen for most maps - over 150
columns is a good idea!). There's three lines at the beginning to enable
debugging. $debug enables the map printing and a few other bits. $debugscore
tells you the current money and score. $debugpause makes it wait for you to
press enter after the map has been drawn. In the map the standard characters
are used to identify the type of square, to the left of the type character
player numbers are displayed, and if there are any packages on that square a
P followed by the number of packages will be displayed after the type
character.

There's quite a bit of code still left in there from ideas which I've since
given up on, hopefully it won't slow it down too much (although with the test
maps it can easily manage a move in 1 CPU second on my P400 with all the
debugging enabled - so there's probably nothing to worry about).

Anyway, like I said - I was bored, and here's a bodged up perl script which
seems to do the job :)
