Tin-Foil hat time

[krokkrok]

How do we know that a hacker-bot is not cracking the server and loading our bot and then running the next turn so it can predict what our bot will do?

How could we detect such a bot?

I got to thinking about this because my new bot makes non-deterministic moves and it just beat a very high ranking bot and it occurred to me that if a bot was doing this a non-deterministic bot would be its bane!

[cobracom]

Off topic - I wouldn't make my bot non-deterministic if I were you. In the last contest I've played with a non-deterministic tron-bot and there are two annoying things about it:
1. It's hard to benchmark. Every run can result with a different outcome
2. It's hard to debug (and indeed my final bot had a bug which made me lose a few simple games that escaped my unit tests due to its randomness)

[krokkrok]

Yeah, its impossible to debug!
But, I only do it when my bot gets locked into a losing position. Its sort of like jiggling it so it can find its way out of the trap.

[Mistmanov]

I'm afraid that if someone is hacking the competition server, we wouldn't stand a chance of winning anyway, random tactics or not

When you seem to be in a losing position (less ships, less growth, and no indication that it's going to change), doing some weird things in the hope that the enemy bot won't be able to handle it might certainly be a good idea. At the moment, my losing strategy is basically "keep losing, and hope that the enemy will "go for the kill" and make mistakes that allow me to rebound". Or in other words, I don't have a strategy dealing with losing situations -_-

Still, I wouldn't use random numbers. I would just remove some of the "is this a good idea?" checks. But maybe some randomness can work in your favor (I can imagine that some of the top bots are already distributing their defenses based on common offensive algorithms. If you're doing something completely different, you might have an edge..)

You probably already thought of it, but if you use random numbers, you should at least safe the number that you used to seed the random number generator. That way, when the program does something unexpected, you can at least recreate it =)

[dimkadimon]

[voidptr]