[ricardobeat]

It’s amazing how a simple algorithm performs so well, the autopilot is able to recover from some pretty extreme situations, and does it gracefully.

Adding some realism to the engine physics (firing delays, minimum firing time, power ramp up, heat limits etc) would likely make it 10x harder.

[giomasce]

Especially nondeterminism. Everything you say is still deterministic, so either you're able to land or you're not. With nondeterminism it's more interesting. You have to make tradeoffs between optimizing resources and making success probable.

[dwringer]

Thanks for this comment, I hadn't thought to try and sabotage my trajectory prior to engaging autopilot. I thought for sure it was gonna fail, but it managed to set me down gently right at the last moment quite brilliantly.