We brought a foosball table, a popcorn machine, and a hungry Xenomorph to the BeerUp tech festival.

For Dakai Group's tent I built a small programming challenge called Alien Hunt, loosely inspired by too many hours of Alien: Isolation.

You fall into a pitch-dark 100x100 storage room full of boxes. An alien heard you fall and is coming to investigate. You can't see it. You have a map, a blaster, and a motion tracker, all available through a REST API. Any language works: if you can call an endpoint, you can play.

The short version of the rules:
- The motion tracker only tells you if the alien is somewhere in a given direction. That's your ONLY way to detect it.
- Boxes block movement, vision and gunfire.
- The alien only moves when you move or shoot, so time stands still while you think.
- Every missed shot is heard, and the alien paths straight to where you fired. Your weapon is also a dinner bell.
- To win: shoot it before it eats you, or survive long enough.

The "mindless-shooter" just stands still and shoots clockwise forever. This works surprisingly well, since the alien walks into the line of fire embarrassingly often, and on harder difficulties this beat far more complex approaches.

On easy there's an outright cheese strat. The motion tracker is free here, so you scan all four directions before every action and only shoot when the alien is confirmed. 100% win rate. I kept it in so people could win between two beers (and it's why difficulty levels exist). Most people who got past the README found it, and won their rewards.

On hard the alien moves twice for every action you take, and things get serious. I had to improvise with some heuristics, and at first none of them reliably won.

The "corner-waiter" carefully moves into a reachable corner and covers the two open directions while waiting for the alien to wander into sight. Gets eaten way too frequently.

The "lure" baits the alien to an ideal spot, then waits nearby to spring the trap. Caught in the act more times than it should.

My best solution was the "corridor-shooter". Whenever the alien paths toward a heard shot, it follows a shortest path that resolves the vertical distance first (a bit shameful to exploit this, I know), meaning its final approach is almost always along your row. So you walk a few steps to the longest box-free horizontal corridor nearby, then fire left, right, left, right, every turn. About 93% win rate on hard, measured over 1000 live games.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our tent at BeerUp and traded beer time for API calls.

Think you can do better? The repo is public, the alien has three difficulty levels, and the number to beat on hard is 93%. There's a local simulator so you can benchmark thousands of games in seconds. I don't think a 100% hard-mode strategy exists. Prove me wrong.

https://github.com/rayaqin/alienHunt