Space Steering Revisited

I had to make a detour from my current project to finish up some Newtonian spaceflight steering stuff I worked on a year ago (detailed in parts one, two, and three).



You could think of it as the beginnings of an AI for playing the old game Space Wars, or its descendants the two-player Star Control combat modes.

The rocket is flying to a target position in the lower left; in the background I'm plotting a graph of the objective function it's trying to minimize in order to pick the correct direction to point its thruster. At the moment it's finding the minimum pretty well (its result is the yellow cross). There are situations where it doesn't do so hot, though. I'm doing an extremely simple, brute-force approach to searching for it, and I'm sure I can do much better. I just need to learn something about minimization of nonlinear functions, especially ones with hard-to-compute derivatives.