[simonh]

That's cool, but it has a very conservative descent profile and would use a ton of fuel. Having played Kerbal I'm used to attempting fuel efficient landings, which means more of a suicide burn approach, but of course this game doesn't keep track of that.

There's something timelessly appealing about lunar lander games. The very first game I ever played on a computer, written in BASIC, was a 'turn based' one dimensional lunar lander game where you input how much thrust you used for each second of the descent, and then it recalculated your altitude, velocity, etc. I learned programming by rewriting it to be a real-time game where you pressed a key to fire the engine.

[mft_]

Which points to a lovely idea - the game becomes writing competitive lander algorithms. Just need a bit of JSFiddle adding...

[santiagobasulto]

That'd be very fun indeed!

[someweirdperson]

Maybe not for long, because for a given set of constraints to optimze for, there's probably a solution for which it can be proven to be optimal. At that point there's no more contest.

[TheMaskedCoder]

Obviously next you switch up the game to do things besides lunar landing. Have it be a take off ascent simulator for example. After a few years we can have an entire space mission programmed by gamers...

[simonh]

People have released very sophisticated autopilots for KSP. The game can practically play itself.

[clbrmbr]

Ditto on the timeless appeal.

Watching this auto pilot reminded me of landing Getaceiver on Barsoom in Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, which has a very long passage describing the (fictional) orbital mechanics landing on (a fictional alternate reality version of) Mars.

[zengargoyle]

The first program I ever keyed in was the one dimensional lunar lander simulation on my dad's HP calculator. Must have been 6 or 7 years old (by 9 years old I was doing BASIC on an Apple ][ with floating point card and programming intersections of two pipes to make cutting templates). Even back then I got to the 'suicide burn' approach. Made playing the arcade game pretty easy years later.