Top 3 bots are first submissions!?!?

[kornork]

And the 5 of the top 10 are.

Are you guys holding out on the rest of us, and waiting to submit with your final tweaks until the last days of the contest?

[mac]

[kornork]

If the implementation of bots is so important, then why do the starter bots vary in their initial capabilities? For example, if they Python bot has a pretty good implementation of, say, unseen squares, wouldn't that be an advantage over a starter bot that has no implementation of unseen squares?

[amstan]

They shamelessly used the beta period to work on their bot.

[kornork]

What if...

This might be impractical, but maybe a fundamental change can be made after an alpha period which renders all bots obsolete... for example, maybe the map changes from squares to hexagons. Then there's a beta period of two weeks or so where starter bots are rewritten.

Another possibility is to require beta users to submit new bots in a non-trivially different language... for example, python 2 to python 3 or c to c++ would not be allowed.

[amstan]

[mac]

[crispy]

And besides, not everyone will even hear about the contest on the official launch day.

So yes, nothing to be done about it. The early ant catches the worm.

[dimkadimon]

[tmc]

But contest organisers who don't have direct access to the servers are allowed to compete as well. I think a closed beta would be far worse: far less testing, so you'll need an extended open beta before the contest opens anyway (for example, lots of volunteers needed to write the starter kits), and it doesn't prevent people from starting on bots early unless you keep the game mechanics (and source code!) secret, which sounds like a pretty bad idea, since a lot of debate went into defining the mechanics for this game.

Maybe some bots are months ahead, but I think it is a very small number. Less than 5. Personally I'm not annoyed by this, since I didn't have time to start properly until a week after the start anyway.

Instead, the final ~three week beta could have been advertised more widely, so that more people have a chance to start early if they want.