Gradient Ascent is a web game, inspired by the concepts in some of these page.

To get started, you first you define a graph. This graph contains a large number of nodes with connections between them. Each of the connections have traversal values, either positive or negative. As you play, you navigate the graph, with a goal of keeping all your color values above zero.

It might be a bit bewildering at first, but after a play-through or two, you should have an “ah ha” moment that hopefully keeps you coming back for more. There are various challenge modes, such as keeping all the scores as low as possible while still surviving the graph.

Play here | Source code here

The game is open source software, licensed under GPL 2.0, so it’s hackable, modifiable, and customizable.

I hope you enjoy!

BWM