Ants is over!

[zarkon]

[amstan]

[tiberiu44]

Hello,
I noticed that all bots timeout since the contest started. My bot is written in C# but the timeout happens regardless of the programming language. I do have a timeout check, and also on my computer (which is a Asus n61j laptop) it takes about 100ms for 300 ants (worst case).
I don't see why this is happening, with the timeout check installed in multiple parts of the code and also i would like to mention that the first versions of the bot didn't even have timeout checks and they worked perfectly. I lost a couple of games because of this and they where against some lame bots. In this game seems like everyone timed out:


Also I wanted to know if it counts that I've been fighting an aggressive bot the whole game and I was winning in the end, but we reached the turn limit and he already razed a couple of enemy hills that belong to other bots who did not have any skill?

If the contest does not run for a couple of weeks such situations will have a negative impact on the score (some bots just get lucky).

So, do be concise:
1) Why do the timeouts occur?
2) How long will the contest run?

Thank you!

[Frantic]

[itzkow]

[KhipuKamayuq]

[asmodeus]

[stilkin]

[Frantic]

[gnu264]

While random timeouts did occur during the training phase, they have much more serious effects now: each bot gets to play so preciously few games that even one game lost due to a timeout may have a huge impact on your final ranking! For example, my bot had only 6 games (while, on a side note, other bots had already managed to play 15+ games). During the 7th game, both me and my competitor timed out during the same turn: http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=8532

Would it be possible to introduce a rule like "if two or more bots time out within X turns of each other, the results of the game are disregarded and there is an immediate rematch"?