Noops week 2: Meet the latest bots waiting for you to give them purpose

It’s week two of the Noops challenge, a series of prompts that are inspiring developers all over the world to build something fun with bots, and we have a whole new set of Noops for you to meet. Start with the Mazebot—a wonderfully aimless API that endlessly sends you data mazes to solve, either on your own or with an algorithm. Then meet Automatabot, bringing you Conway’s Game of Life via an API, and Polybot, delivering thousands of random polygons for you to play with. See what you can film with the Cambot, and finish up with a round of code golf with Golfbot.

We loved seeing what thousands of you did with the first week’s Noops. We’ve seen challengers use Hexbot to create randomly generated Vim themes, a DVD screensaver, an Xbox live avatar regenerator, and give purpose to the Directbot like colorful experiences in the terminal.

This week’s Noop lineup

• Don’t get lost with Mazebot: Mazebot provides you with a maze, represented in data, and it’s up to you to find a solution in any language you choose. Mazebot will return with a harder challenge until you progress to a 250 x 250 maze.
  • What you can build: Use the colors from Hexbot to make the maze beautiful—you can even make background music with Drumbot—or build a game to play the maze.
• Get in automata mania with Automatabot: Automatabot is inspired by Conway’s Game of Life in API form. The API gives you a set of cells and their rules as a starting point. Challengers respond with how the matrix will evolve after a number of iterations, and the API confirms whether it’s correct.
  • What you can build: Build a zoo of different automata by creating bigger and more complicated automata or animate the cells on screen—color them with Hexbot or reshape them with Polybot.
• Open a bounding box of problems with Polybot: Polybot sends you up to a thousand polygons of varying sizes (from three sides up to 72). Create beautiful patterns and use them on your other projects—like the terrain for your next game.
  • What you can build: Name all of your polygons, sort your shapes, or maybe add physics to see how your polygons interact.
• Play a round with Golfbot: Golfbot wants to play Code Golf with you. This bot gives you a prompt to write and share code with a given character length. Play You start off with 256 characters—and in the final week, Golfbot will drop it down to 128 characters.
  • What you can build: Your imagination is the limit with this Noop. Looking for inspiration? 10Print is an awesome program that’s just 38 characters long but generates infinite possibilities.
• Bring your device to life with Cambot: Cambot provides you with a prompt to use any of the sensors on your device in an interesting way. You can use the other Noop APIs to customize the data with random colors, polygons, and sounds.
  • What you can build: Build a glitchy webcam view, or create something to help you solve another Noop challenge. You can use your phone’s accelerometer to roll a virtual ball through Mazebot’s puzzles.

Let’s see what you can do with the newest Noops. Need a refresher? Learn about the Noops, and don’t forget to share your creation on Twitter using #NoopsChallenge.

Challenge yourself

Written by

Paul Oliver

@pauliver