Ants is over!

[tiberiu44]

This might also be caused due to the new maps and new bot you are playing against.
Have you replayed the matches on you PC with a profiler attached? Sometimes the code is hitting a very rare cornercase that is beeing lifted due to the new environment. Astar and Quicksort are candidates that pop into my mind. My code does not use any timeout-checks what-so-ever. And as far as I know of (and worked towards) the maximum time complexity of my code lies arround O(n) therefore I just tweaked the code a point that might fit into a large Server-CPU Cache (3-6MB code+data) (Haskell memory profiling is so cute) and rewrote all code that does not meet my worst case time-complexity expectations of O(n).
And all this by using a langauage that was totaly new for me (Haskell) with lazyness and quite ugly thrunk-functions pilling up.

Thank you for your reply KhipuKamayuq. I'll try to replay some games on my machine but I don't think there is a problem with the code. I have some timeout checks inside the code so I don't think this is the problem. I wonder if it's not a problem related to mono. I believe that is what is used on the server to run C# code. Also some players may have more than one active processing threads. Is there any safeguard installed for this? It was mentioned in the contest rules that this is not allowed but who knows.
Anyway, I ran my bot against the a1k0n bot and his bot is really great. Congratulations to him and best of luck!

[Zergatul]

Why games count per player is so different? Between 5 and 20...

[runevision]

I'm also seeing extreme differences in number of games the bots have been in and it doesn't seem related to rank. Even after winning 6 out of 6 games, it still took ages before i finally got a seventh (where I then lost, d'oh!). I assume it will all be sorted out though; it just requires a lot of patience.

In the meantime, why not show each other some epic battles we've witnessed? I've captured a few here:

http://blog.runevision.com/2011/12/epic ... ideos.html

(It's annotated YouTube videos of these two battles):
http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=9661
http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=9661

[LoneWolf]

Great contest, I wish I had known about it earlier, with time I think my bot could be a lot better, but time was not enough.
Its way too addictive.

I'll try to replay some games on my machine but I don't think there is a problem with the code. I have some timeout checks inside the code so I don't think this is the problem. I wonder if it's not a problem related to mono. I believe that is what is used on the server to run C# code. Also some players may have more than one active processing threads. Is there any safeguard installed for this? It was mentioned in the contest rules that this is not allowed but who knows.

I had 3 games out of 13 with timeouts and trying them out locally was the first thing I tried, and the turns it timed out were not even the heavier ones, my bot had more intensive turns before that without timing out, my bet is concurrency on the servers but I know little about the servers being used.

I also agree that this may have a negative effect of some good bots (mine included here).

Other thing I have to say is the time remaining, seems rather short considering the current game rate, hope the organizers start cutting the starter bots soon. But still I already think time is too short.

[salar2k]

22 December is too early,
just 4 days??

[Surya]

Just so you guys know:

Cutoff has been done and only the first 5000 bots are still playing.
You can see the cutoff state on the server statistics webpage.

A lot of servers are running right now (33 at the moment) So we could expect to have a great improvement of the game rate since cutoff will keep doing his job in a few hours.

[amstan]

Finals are now extended to Friday 23rd at 9PM EST.

[Janzert]

And the cutoff is now lowering to 3000 over the next 2 hours.

[tictac]

i must say i am now more confident for a convergence on friday: top 100 begins to take shape ( and i am moving to the bottom of it ) probably not a total convergence on friday, but after all i dont really care if i am 97 or 107 .... but its important to discriminate between rank 7 and 17 . IE the cuttof could probably extend way beyonfdthe 500 proposed by jansert at the end of the contest : i ll be ok to watch 2 hours of matches only between top 20 bots (could you technically duplicate teh bots to run the same match in parralllel with differents seeds for the top 20 at the very end? ), to sort them super accuratly

[amstan]

i must say i am now more confident for a convergence on friday: top 100 begins to take shape ( and i am moving to the bottom of it )

I like that criteria: If you're in the top 100 then top 100 must be getting more accurate.