Responsibilities

Your brain server has a couple of responsibilities. Besides forming the brain of your boids, it also needs to convince the workshop server it is operating within well established parameters.

A lot of things can go wrong. And we need to check for those. One of the things that can go wrong is that your web server has stopped. Your web server must respond to a heartbeat request so we know you server is still participating.

/heartbeat

The workshop server periodically will send a HEAD request to your brain server. It should respond with a 204 indicating a successful request without content. This will tell the workshop server your web server is still running.

/brain

The workshop server needs to know how your boids are going to react to their environment and peers. It will send a POST request with your current flock as JSON data. Your brain server should figure out the intent of each boid in your flock and send their intentions back as JSON.

The workshop server will take your response and integrate that in the simulation.