The kind of sad club

[tictac]

ahah i was going to start this kind of whiny thread...
i introduced time outs in one of my last versions

i was lucky so far and it didnt really cost me a game, i usually time out when i am above 100 ants so i can usually stick to 2nd place but its disappointing. and i tested it on the tcp servers, but attributed the time out to unresponsive servers .... seems not to be the case. My hope is that its releated to the number of reachable food i increased the number of path finding for food in one of my last delivery, hopefully againstgood bots there wont be too much laying around.

also i spotted quite some bugs that i could have fixed .... oh well

To benJakcson : well i am more responsible at work, i sometime have to calm down management and ask for test time even for 1 line bugfix. ("but you said it was a trivial fix, you did it in 5 min ?? why 1 day of tests ???" "because shit happens") but here i let myself be carried away.

Fun story : after submitting arounf midnight (in europe) i woke up at 2 am with the fear that i had a real timeout and i added some time out checks .. but not enough it seems.
and i did refrain from shipping a last minute quite ambitious combat change to avoid some ant suicides. it would have rocked .... or not

[zaphod]

Oops, I just typed a long story and lost it because I had forgotten to login to the forums! Not in a mood to type it again...

On the positive side, I've also learnt not to check in code at the last minute even if the code is not related to work!

[MagnumPU]

I have to share this game:

http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=8111

So, one of the last minute changes made my ants each a little suicidal, so far that has only lost me a game or two right at the beginning. But dang, in this game I was the lone survivor and got 2nd because I wouldn't raze hills somewhat near my own. My hill defense that I tweaked at the last minute caused that, I was concerned about getting trapped near my hill at the beginning and screwed something up. Anyway, can't wait for the next contest, but kind of can because I need a little time to learn. BTW Ben, you're doing great!

[MagnumPU]

Funny how you wait all day for a game then get three back to back. That's cool, it's like Christmas or another holiday with gifts. Here are some suicidal ants:

http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=8111

Anyone who posted their code and described their strategy, I really thank you.

[J.S.F.]

Same error, I use a highly math based scoring function. Most scores are calculated by diving by the square root of the distance to the target and multiplying by some constant associated with the type of target. However my hill attack had a bonus that was a linear function of distance so I could pull in far away ants to the ever important target. I noticed ants getting confused not knowing which hill to go to when they were roughly equidistant from 2 hills so I decided to just award points for one primary target hill at a time. Good idea eh??? Imagine my horror when I noticed post-submission ants moseying right past undefended hills on their way to heavily guarded "primary_target" hills. Easily fixed by assigning points/sqrt(dist) for all hills and points proportional to dist to primary targets but too late now, sigh I imagine you were doing the same sort of thing. I'm about as frustrated as a blind man with an invitation to the playboy mansion right now!

[McLeopold]

Us contest admins have our fun to. During the finals "outage", janzert and I managed to commit 6 or 7 versions of php code that wasn't even proper syntax.

Of course, the pressure is higher for us. You screw up and 1 bot is out. We screw up and people find out where we live and visit us with pitchforks.

[MagnumPU]

[Hippo]

On Planetwars I did the same ... last minute changes put my bot from top 100-150 to around 300.

This is why I spent most of last weekend just by debugging this year. A lot of written code I actually don't use just because I had not eneough time for testing. ... and the to_do list remains long.

[MagnumPU]

I know nobody cares, but I just let 6 hills off the hook: http://aichallenge.org/visualizer.php?g ... &user=8111

[qgazq]