alright, running a SlM tournament with the shafts changed to something that shouldn't collapse on itself, if it's in the top 4, replacing MoaR with it

oh wow Monorail robbed SlM and now has 511 food o.O

restarting the tournament because I had a stupid rule that made it so that it settles down with only 3 correct colors (instead of 3 incorrect ones) :/

22 games in, 1st place :D

0.1 score away from Windmill though, but has an average of 325 food compared to Windmills 243

ouch, collided with windmill and scored 2 & dropped to 4th place

Finished in 2nd place with score 14.0, below windmill with 14.3 and above LS with 13.8. Average food gained is 320 (the biggest :D), Windmill - 2nd with 249 (followed by Glider@124 and LS@120)

@dzaima So you're going to submit it, right?

@Alion mhm

interestingly, removing all other players from the results, Windmill won in 19 games, but SlM - 20

with other players, SlM won 20 games, but Windmill only 17

@dzaima You're gonna have those discrepancies. For example, a test version of Highway won 9 games and took the 7th place, behind guys like Single Queen and Lone Wolf (with <2 wins each).

@Alion I'm just giving random statistics, I know that SlM wins in many ways but not the official scoring one :p

Speaking of which, I'm in the process of revamping the worker logic for Highway. It's the last main thing to do (besides some small improvements). I've stumbled upon a frustrating bug in my previous logic, too. There was an instruction that caused it to fill the main rail with the side-rail's colors... whoops.

@dzaima I know, just wanted to plug Highway's high winrate :P

I'm trying to add an option to skip till move X on my controller, and, as always with doing something with Daves controller, I'm regretting attempting it

@dzaima Ooh, that would be useful. Shame that Dave's controller is so arcane, though...

At least it's fast. I guess you can't have both...

@Alion I think the main reason it's so weird is because that has to support many different KotHs, not only this one

@dzaima Yea, it was designed with the ability to create teams, to support different rendering schemes, different tournament types...

@dzaima Oh, and remember my edge-tracing? That's actually gonna stay, but now the workers will try to color as many cells as they can before they move. For example, a Windmill shaft is going to be fully painted over by the time the fourth worker comes, avoiding the dreaded bottleneck (which was a source of multiple problems in the previous version).

Oh wow, SlM actually looks nice. And it just shifts the shafts and re-explores territory because of the main rail being 3-long...

@Alion unfortunately that's one of its biggest bottlenecks - having to rewrite everything on every loop

that's why I want to make a 4-long rail

@dzaima Yeah, but usually you'll have a lot of food by the time you get back to the start. Unless you start vertically, then that's a slight problem.

(potentially adding shafts going from both sides)

I love how they sometimes congregate in front of the Queen, all of them trying to help with the main rail (but only 1(?) can).

@Alion the workers aren't really supposed to do that, they should just stay behind :p

Oh, whoops.

the problem is that I haven't implemented that if you're wondering

if it wouldn't cause way too many problems, I'd just have the workers do absolutely nothing if they see the queen

Found something pretty funny...

@Alion yeah, I'm not surprised that can happen :p

oh wait yeah the worker has food so it's reversed

oh huh that's actually probably a bug in my implementation

I just simply changed the shaft pattern, not surprised it breaks stuff :p

@dzaima It changes some colors while running around in the loop, too. Couldn't show it on a static picture, though...

@Alion yeah, I replicated it on Draco18s controller.

oh wait it works as intended™

it should be fixable by changing the priorities of whether it's more likely of just having gotten food or that its shaft has been destroyed :p

alright, hopefully fixed with no long-lasting problems

Semi-random thought: As a laden worker, don't fix the main rail if there are enemies nearby.

Source: Windmill's 2 workers blocking SlM's 20 laden workers...

@Alion the same could happen with unladen workers, so in result you can't fix the rail with enemies nearby at all :/

it might be worth implementing peer pressure to move on if everyone's waiting for you :p

first though I want to implement skipping in my controller

@dzaima Actually, I'm dumb. That's what I've done and it works great. I don't know why I hadn't suggested that first. Then again, I've implemented that only as a method of avoiding worker trains on the side lines, which are borderline immune to damage - the same can't be said about a 3-wide rail.

Worst case scenario - you build some 90° rotated rail...

@Alion that'd be one of the best cases IMO - worst case would be that my worker starts participating in the blockade

@dzaima Oh, yeah, that. On a side note - I should probably stop investigating SlM's problems and instead focus on my Highway. The deadline for the bounty is still probably a while away, so I don't have to worry too much, but I'll never get it out at this rate.

Actually, I probably don't even have to care about the bounty - I ain't getting it as long as Vampire's around...

btw the 4 long rail idea came from your highway being so successful, and the only difference between it and SlM is that it keeps its progress. A SlM type thing is way more resistant and can leave many colors empty though

What generic koth framework? I want to design my own challenge after I get my submission done

@eaglgenes101 github.com/davidje13/koth-webplayer

I'm planning to revive a popular (but ultimately abandoned) challenge from meta after I'm more-or-less done with both Highway and Edgehugger. I'm also going to be using Dave's framework :)

Hmm... Possible improvements are popping up constantly. I improve/fix one thing, and two more become apparent as a result... I mean, they're not critical for proper functioning, but they're very-nice-to-haves that I just can't pass up on for now...

\o/ finally got skipping working :D

67 lines modified though

now to finally make the time shortcuts not activate way too much

aand that seems to work too :D

I think I just finished doing something incredible. Highway now manages to clean the map with just 400 workers.

Running empty map tournament to see average food collected now... it will take a while, though.

Oh god. "A while" is a woeful understatement. I'm gonna be sitting here for hours...

Okay. On an empty map, 1000 food collected is what's called "an extreme slip-up" now, not the average case. I knew that the worker movement logic was fairly flawed, but I didn't know it was that flawed.

I don't think I need the exact numbers on this, but on an empty map it averages about 1400 food with 350 workers. Now, for the real challenge: the Hill!

@dzaima Currently, Highway gets absolutely destroyed by SlM. :c

HalfThere had a bug that hasn't shown up in 6 months of tournaments, but was finally shown up by the caching controller due to being able to run through games much faster. It doesn't return anything if the queen is surrounded by 8 ants and has nowhere to move. Now disqualified, but easy to fix

@trichoplax How did the Queen get surrounded by 8 ants?! That's insane!

The queen never produces workers, so it just got unlucky (or lucky, considering it never stumbled into this situation in 6 months of continuous tournaments...)

All I know is they were all enemy workers, 7 type 4s and a type 2. The disqualification message doesn't show anything that isn't revealed to the ant function, so I can't see whether they were all from one enemy player or from several

I'm now very confused about whether there is a problem with the caching. @GNiklasch's controller as at 14th Feb 2018 has now played 11,822 games without slow down (still averaging just over 2 minutes per game). My controller using the same caching code slowed right down and disqualified lots of players for going over time, so I ran the next tournament on @GNiklasch's controller. However, now that has slowed down too and disqualified a player for going over time, so I don't know what to think now

So I've started a new tournament on my controller to see if the slow down was a one off

I'm baffled and intrigued

After 8 hours of investigating, debugging, fixing and improving Highway, I managed to get it to this level of performance on an empty map (with hoarding mechanism tuned for the Hill). Next is preparing it for the Hill, which shouldn't be too hard - I know (more or less) what I need to do.

That's a lot of workers :)

@trichoplax And a lot of food. Efficiency is still not up to Windmill standards, but I must have a lot of works to keep the Highway from falling apart. Also, it unfortunately takes a lot of time to run the games - I waited an entire hour to have all those 50 games finish.

I see I'm going to have to wait longer for tournaments to finish too :P I guess I have more optimising to do...

Actually it shouldn't be as bad in a tournament, where there are other players snatching the food and not all turning it into workers

@trichoplax I recommend trying to enable strict mode. Your controller reports times between 3-6 ms on my computer, whereas Dave's controller reports 2-3 ms (before caching kicks in and the times fall down a lot). There's also the chance of "Web Workers, yo!", but I have no clue if they change anything.

I was very interested in both strict mode and web workers up until discovering how much difference caching could make. Now my priority is getting caching working reliably before moving onto any other optimisations. They are still very much of interest for after that though

Any future JS KotHs will definitely use strict mode from the outset...

@trichoplax Yes, but avoiding the described situation is what I've mostly kept my focus on for the entirety of this day. I wanted to get Highway to start really quickly, so it has a chance to forcefully remove opponents before they have a chance to start. It now utilizes a Wildfire-like approach, where workers need not travel far to get to the Queen in the early-game. It changes a bit when the main rail is complete, but then we enter "mid-game", and when we're there, we're golden.

It now completes the main rail with as many as 50 workers by its side...

20-30, if it starts vertically.

Looking forward to seeing it when it's posted :)

The initial version should be ready as soon as tomorrow, though I have a lot of minor improvements to make before I let this entry go and start work on Edgehugger.

Feel free to post it and keep working on it - it'll be fun to see even before it's finished

@trichoplax It's currently borderline worthless on the Hill. I need to fix some nagging bugs that make it self-destruct very often. I'll keep working on less pressing problems after I post it.

Sounds good

@dzaima I've just watched Sliding Miners on an empty arena. It looks like it's raining ants... I love the way the workers rejoin the rail if their mineshaft doesn't find anything, and how they explore the same area again once the rail wraps round.

@trichoplax You'll love what the Highway does, then. It creates waves... In previous versions, the effect was more pronounced, but after the worker logic rework, they fill "valleys" much quicker...

From your previous descriptions I'm imagining a horrifying hybrid of Miners on a Rail and Wildfire. I can't quite picture it, hence being keen to see it in action...

@trichoplax If I were to describe it with other entries, I'd say Monorail base and Wildfire's scorch, plus the colorfulness of pattern-based entries.

I wonder what Vampire will make of it...

/me licks lips

@trichoplax Quick work.

It'll probably depend on how juicy of a target it is. Black hole, firefly, and zigurrat are quickly falling off of the "targets" list just due to how easily they get corrupted and how low their food stores are.

...unfortunately. I explored a lot of options, and I can't find a counter.

That is: the expected return is less than about 4 food

Vampire updates against Windmill are fantastic, still have an odd bug against MoaR I need to research

@Draco18s An old version of Highway scored an average of 400 food in a real tournament.

(vampire finds a way to turn all of its own food into workers, that then string out in lines behind the queen...its very weird)

@Alion Sure, that would be worth targetting.

@Alion What kind of counter? For timing or tracking numbers of workers?

He means a counter to Vampire, to avoid been sucked dry

Ah I see.

Watching Sliding Miners on a full arena, it appears to have a countermeasure but I'm not sure it's intentional. Workers help rebuild the main rail, and quite often get confused and start "repairing" where there was no rail to start with. This was a potential countermeasure I was wondering if anyone would try - wasting Vampire's time with fake structures that don't lead anywhere