ha

Fake structures is actually why black hole is now worth negative food in the cost-benefit calculation

Too easy for ants to construct fake structures (or even if real: places the bh-queen won't ever be). And even when vampire WAS finding the true BH, it was too easy for BH's workers to steal food away from Vampire

The 14 Feb tournament is still running and has that version of Glider at the top, still in joint place with Lightspeed but making a valiant effort to pull ahead (13.69 against 13.68 after 11,878 games). The improvements to Glider were seeing it in first place, but that tournament was lost to disqualifications. The tournament started today has Sliding Miners, Windmill, Lightspeed, and Glider in joint 1st place, but it's too soon to divide more finely than that (they're all swapping places)

That won't have my vampire fixes

noted

In the past, use of console.log has resulted in automated disqualification, since access to console.log is only given to the new challenger player. However, Sliding Miners accidentally left a console.log in the code and the browser was displaying the output in the console, and no disqualification happened. I have no idea why.

As a temporary fix for new challenger not being able to use console.log, I have simply disabled caching for the new challenger. Longer term I'd like new challenger to be cached, but have its console output cached too, so the console can display identically to without caching

@Alion I'm sorry for the delay in fixing this. Although it's not how I want it to be yet, you should now be able to use console.log for the new challenger. Let me know if there are still problems with it.

@trichoplax Oh, so that's why SlM was taking forever and a half... Good catch!

Yeah, the latest tournament was running about 15% slower too...

(although part of that may be down to having hundreds of workers...)

@trichoplax It's not a massive problem anymore, and not having caching at all is more disastrous than not having console.log. You can circumvent the second by inserting console.log into code whenever it's needed - it clears the cache, so no problems there. I'd prefer having a way to enable/disable caching for the NEW CHALLENGER.

O_O my new Sliding Miners I made yesterday got 1st place with 14.1 score (above Glider & LS with 13.5). It won 27 / 35 games where it participated. An average of 421 food

SlM was taking 0.7ms on Dave's, which I thought was borderline impossible. Highway takes 0.3ms, and it's the slowest piece of machinery in existence.

@Alion I see. What do you think of the idea of having caching permanently on but allowing the logging to work despite it (so the log looks like it would without caching)?

@trichoplax yeah, I fixed that mistake in the new SlM it's been in the old one for months :p

@trichoplax Of course, that would be optimal (as long as the performance hit isn't too noticeable).

@dzaima I'm 307 games into a tournament with last night's player versions and it currently has Sliding Miners at 14.09 followed by Glider at 13.75 (not resolved into a unique 1st place, but looking strong so far)

@dzaima I'm curious to see whether Vampire will be able to attack a player that leaves fake rails scattered all over the arena :P

@trichoplax I meant completely new & rewritten - the one published is almost the same one as the one pasted here a long time ago

Oh I see. Well it's looking a strong contender for 1st place already. Not clear from this whether your new one will do better or worse

(the current one is often getting hundreds of food)

@trichoplax eh, I was just surprised about that 27/35 won statistic :p

I guess the stats are similar for the old one if the score is near identical...

@trichoplax I wish Highway could scatter fake main rails all over the arena... it would be suicidal, though.

@dzaima The worrying thing is that the controller didn't pick up the error. I really want it to reject logging players immediately so tournaments can be run quickly. I'm not sure why it has stopped throwing errors for console.log

@Alion You don't have a spare worker type to send out for that purpose...?

there was a game where it got score 0, and there a trail eraser erased the rail immediately and left the workers with no clue of where they are :/

@Alion But yes, I'm amazed that Sliding Miners isn't self defeating with all the fake rails at different angles.

@trichoplax I'm surprised too :p

@dzaima Is it worth trying to time how long since a worker last visited, and returning to solo searching after a delay?

@trichoplax I do, but since my late game is "cover entire map", a main rail is fairly suicidal anywhere on the map. I could build a 90 deg rotated side rail, though...

@trichoplax if that were possible, yes..

@trichoplax the new one should be even better though, as it has shafts going out from both sides and if there's a rail near one side it'll still have the other mostly working still

If I think about it, my pattern is so rotationally variant that I don't know if a 90 deg rotated any rail would hurt. Hmm...

@trichoplax You might've just indirectly given me a great idea.

@Alion I was considering using a return value rather than directly console logging. For example return {cell:4, log:'hi'}, which would probably be easier to work around the cache. Would this cause any problem with your usage of console.log (or anyone else's)?

I could then just always deny direct access to console.log

@trichoplax what I like about your controllers debugging tools is that you can explore the objects in the console, so I'd like an option to use the regular console logging rather than stringifying

@trichoplax Oof. I return objects directly from code, so I would have to rework my franework a bit.

@dzaima Interesting and useful insight. Thank you both @Alion . I wonder if that could still work with something like return {cell:4, log:object}?

logObject = [object1, object2]
return {cell:4, log: logObject}

@trichoplax thinking about it, yes it could. They wouldn't be modified later, so relogging would work fine then

I don't want to make this unusable for people who haven't had this conversation though. Do you think this could be explained intuitively so people are aware they can return arbitrarily many objects?

@trichoplax I'm fine with this. I don't do debugging with Dave's, so the different mechanisms wouldn't bother me much.

@trichoplax can't you make console.log push to a log variable?

@dzaima Perfect. That's exactly what I need. The player doesn't have to know there's anything different going on

Though it might be annoying for people who use the two different controllers for debugging.

@Alion Agreed - this makes @dzaima's suggestion much more suitable

Player code should be able to be pasted into any controller and have the same effect

Provided I can override the behaviour of console.log, this will be fine. Unfortunately, Sliding Miners managed to access the real console.log, without any trickery, so presumably all players can access it. I'll experiment and see if defining an overriding console.log works better than just not defining anything

..just now I found a bug in my code that made the food pattern act very strangely..

When you are scoring so close to the theoretical maximum possible score, fixing a bug could be detrimental...

@trichoplax mhm

was going trough the games where it didn't score first and it just didn't repair the shaft going back

also it turns out that ants would get easily tricked into thinking they're by the rail even if they matched only 2/3 colors, resulting in green trails in the correct place equalling a rail. Rerunning that game, hoping for score 15 :D

Setting your sights high :)

(or do you just mean 15 for that one seed?)

@trichoplax it already has 545 food @ 16k moves

@trichoplax that game

I've seen the old version get almost 700 on several occasions...

@trichoplax it's got 14k moves still though

Oh yeah...

oh no another fake rail appeared

The old one would often get several hundred food by half way, then fall apart and get nothing for the rest of the game, but still win

I like how Ziggurat looks with 3/4ths of it deleted :p

with how colorful the map is I'm surprised that there aren't hundreds of fake rails

I was seeing quite a few...

@trichoplax I hope not hundreds though :p

No, maybe 5 or 10

I don't exactly remember how fake-rail error-prone was the original SlM

@dzaima I saw one game with 19 (counted) fake rails by the end...

With the version from yesterday.

@Alion oh okay thats bad

Does it make a big difference to build mine shafts on both sides? Can the workers tell which side is already built on and use the other side, or do they just randomly pick a side?

@dzaima Though it somehow did alright - 3rd spot (behind Windmill and LS).

@trichoplax there are left and right type workers which just mine at their side

@Alion yeah, there's only a 1/6 (I hope that's implemented correctly) chance that a parallel rail will be horrible as it needs to be aligned properly

Why didn't I think of that? So I guess that means they gather more of the short journey food early on and get significantly more food before others find it

@dzaima Does that still apply after wrapping when the rail catches up with its start and goes out of phase?

@dzaima feel like it's going to be SlM vs Highway soon (until Vamp ruins the fun...)

@trichoplax oh right, wrapping changes the alignment, making only 1/2 safe, but still 1/6 before wrapping

@trichoplax new new one though when looping connects perfectly by being 4 long, so only 1/8 of fake rails should be a problem

Then it's going to be a contest who can be more Vamp-proof, lol.

@dzaima Hmm. So will a worker who left before the rail wrapped, and finds no food, build their mine shaft straight through the wrapped rail and ignore it?

@dzaima Ah - is that why there are gaps in the screenshot, where Ziggurat's colours show through?

@trichoplax mhm, that's exatly what I wanted to show :p

@trichoplax I think he's referring to the amount of fake rails that are going to be interpreted as real ones (correct me if I'm wrong).

@Alion eh, both are pretty much in the same league of worker dispension (unless you've made some drastic changes)

@dzaima Does that mean you miss out on 25% of the food?

@Alion mhm

@trichoplax mhm

I don't know yet whether I'll make miners that get those

maybe make a very small amount of 1 type miners which only take one side getting those

@Alion Yes I was just wondering about the chance of interpreting the real rail as fake if it wrapped while you were building a mine shaft, so it looks out of phase by the time you get back to it. Won't apply with the new version though

@trichoplax oh that makes me wonder whether the 1/6 applies at all now

@dzaima Dual SlM looks scary, tbh...

I feel like it's going to win more because it starts earlier (and is probably more resilient in general).

@Alion why does it start earlier? but yeah it's pretty resilient

speaking of which, I still need to decide what food amount should I get before settling down & starting

@dzaima How much food does it collect before it starts?

@Alion currently 2, but that's subject to change.

@dzaima Highway currently collects 1 for LS-start, and then 6 before real-start.

@Alion oh wow. I still need to add LS start and then probably increase the starting food count

@dzaima Do try to figure out what to do with the additional worker. My thoughts resulted in ultimately speeding up the start 3-fold.

@Alion I think it's gonna be used (together with more its kind workers) for anti-vampire stuff

@Alion I feel like it's gonna win as it's basically a more concretified Highway but has many colors of the road white

@dzaima Highway, on the other hand, "protects" the main rail from intruders... Though, yeah, I agree that yours will probably get the win.

The starting phase sometimes goes horribly wrong? Or well? I'm not sure. I found a game where it already had 110 workers before the rail got finished.

By frame 15k, it already had >50% of the map under control...

Oh god. @trichoplax Games with Highway are terrible. If something breaks, usually it just spams workers anyway. So if it's doing good, it's slow. If it's getting rekt, it's slower.

Oh, and currently, Sliding Miners are getting their asses handed to 'em. I don't know how much that will change after @dzaima's update, though.

It's so intriguing. You're both talking about player versions that I can't see...

also I think I struck gold with the worker spawning rule for the new SlM - for the first couple thousands of moves it gets absolutely no food but then, suddenly, after ~100 workers, it gets food quite quickly

@dzaima Heh, I managed to get something similar.

One more (hopefully simple) fix and Highway's going on main.

@trichoplax now you can see one :p

@dzaima It it stable enough to replace the old one when testing Highway?

@Alion yeah, as I said before - 27/35 first places :p

it also doesn't spam workers very well because of the worker spawning method

Yeah, that "hopefully simple fix" isn't as simple as I hoped it would be...

oh, it's currently set to mostly not spawn workers after the 1st loop around. Not sure whether that would be worth changing though

I've just remembered that I should make the ants unable to match being above the rail anywhere else other than their shaft starts/ends, that should make the 1/8 fake rail bad chance active. Currently it's either 1/1 or 1/2 :/

I'm wondering if at some specific food count it'd be worth it leaving the queen in a bunker so noone steals food from it

one windmill worker holding the whole SlM back :/

time to implement peer pressure?

okay that doesn't work well enough if the peers aren't willing to go to their places. How about workers which do nothing color around enemies?

Oh crap... Now I've got a dilemma. Should I submit a 6th place Highway, or should I work on advanced pattern matching?

@dzaima A bunker made from 8 workers?

@trichoplax mhm

That does seem to be entirely vampire proof. I've been wondering if anyone would use that with an access mechanism to allow returning laden workers in.

@trichoplax what I plan to do for vampire proofing is keep a worker on every queens corner, so a vampire couldn't (easily) have enough places to put workers to gain food

@trichoplax I've been wondering too :p

@dzaima Oh, what?! 600 food with 200 workers on frame 17k?! Highway is already irrelevant and it's not even out...

And it got stuck, too...

There's no such thing as a final version - just keep improving...

@trichoplax I mean, yeah, sure, I won't just abandon the project right here, but even in collection rates Highway got beat, and that was the only thing that it leaned on...

There is still vampire proofing as a differentiator...

Wait, actually, advanced pattern matching isn't as hard in my framework as I feared it would be. I might be able to slap on a quick fix and worry about cleaner stuff later.

I feel like making a 3rd rewrite of my framework just to make the patterns objects..

Thinking long term, and for people with limited RAM, I'm considering making caching per game. Most of the benefit seems to be realised within a single game. This would avoid excessive memory use as more players arrive, without having to limit the amount of memory available to an individual player's cache during a game

@trichoplax I'd suggest comparing the two methods for speed though

Yes definitely, but the speed of the first game seems good enough to at least make a branch and find out

@trichoplax that's what Daves controller is doing (unless its code is way more obscure than I can see)

I may also be motivated by wanting to avoid investigating the elusive slow down problem with long term cache...

Which somehow seems to have disappeared, which makes it even harder to investigate, while still having the potential to return later, so I can't just pretend it never happened

yay finally fixed the spawned miner side bias..

The problem with the Wildfire-like start is that it creates a really thick part of the Highway, while ignoring the another. This makes a part of the Highway very fragile in the early-game.

Though the faster start is probably worth it anyway.

peer pressure seems to be causing more problems than anticipated..

fixed by making peer pressure only active when the queen is the first on the rail

I accidentally discovered a formation of workers that stops LS from moving - 3 in a line if hit from an unfortunate direction. Got drained because of that...

@Alion huh, after all these modifications, on the same map on move 21k it's got only 396 food (and 152+96 workers).

seems it's lost all its workers :/

@dzaima Probably butterfly effect. I've had loads of inexplicable differences like that when doing minor changes to Highway.

As a wise man once said, "Reproducible unit tests are a bit of a rarity in this KOTH ;)"

heh, the same looping bug you found for the old SlM is showing up here too :p

it'll be a bit harder to fix though

Hm, the LS bug is a problem. I need to decide between retracing path significantly more often or getting stuck once in a hundred games...

I'll just add it as a TODO and decide later - I've got a Highway to publish right now.

now to add peer pressure for miners..

What?! I just found the most insanely unlucky game for Highway. Not only did it not find the first piece of food for 3000 moves (which is a 0.05% chance, by the way), it also flew straight into Monorail territory, losing its Partner due to mis-ID of the main rail, it then traveled into Medusa territory, and mis-ID that too. Everything went wrong!!

And it was a freelo game, too. No Windmill, SlM, Zig, nothing.

Oh yeah, and it also didn't find any food along the main rail it built (0.05% as well).

@Alion heh

That game had a less than 0.000025% to go as wrong as it did.

^ That's some naive calculation, now that I think about it, but it's in the ballpark.

Okay, Highway finished with an average of 12.6 score (and highest # of wins). There's still a bunch I can improve, but I think it's ready enough for main.

@Alion that's with the old or new SlM?

@dzaima Old one, unfortunately.

I've got a lot material to fix from that tournament, though, so an update will probably come pretty soon.

Or, er, actually, no. Stuff that I've got to fix isn't actually that easy to fix...

@Alion is it only me or does your syntax highlighting edit actually do nothing?

@dzaima I was thinking "surely that's just a bug on my part, right?" Turns out it's not. Do you happen to know the reason behind this?

ಠ_ಠ SE

fixed.. (added a newline before the comment)

@dzaima I thought I tried that... Well, whatever.

@Alion I'd guess you tried after. Anyway, it's SEs fault :p

What the hell? The syntax highlighting just fixed itself for the entry I'm currently posting... ???

@Alion it takes a while to show up in the preview

I don't know why it was broken in the first place, though. There was a newline before the comment.

@Alion ^^

I just added some pictures for your enjoyment, as well!

oh wow it starts beautifully

Alright, I'm gonna take a pseudo-break from this challenge for a day or two. After yesterday's marathon, I'm absolutely spent. I'll participate in some light chatting on here, though. And I'm open to observations/suggestions.

Just watched Highway on an empty arena - once with a vertical highway and once with a horizontal. Over 1700 food with a vertical, and over 1900 with a horizontal. The horizontal filled the entire arena, consuming all of the food as far as I could see, and left a join that snaked like a meandering river over geological time, threatening to join into itself and form ox bow lakes...

Over 500 workers, and all delivered their food back to the queen except 1...

(total food delivered to the queen, including those used to make workers: 2499/2500)

Doesn't quite cover the whole arena with a vertical rail, despite creating a similar number of workers. I guess because of the longer return trip for the workers

@trichoplax Yea, on an empty map it's about as insane as it can be. You can change the lines marked by // Tuning: Hill and // Tuning: Empty map towards what you want to tune the hoarding mechanism (if I remember correctly).

One has to be commented away, though. And I'm fairly sure the Empty map tuning is out of date. Meh, whatever.

Just watching it in a crowded arena now. Glider crashed into the bow wave and left a big hole in it. Beautiful to see the hole just heal up seamlessly, like it had never been there

(leaving severed Glider wings encased in amber)

@trichoplax Or, occasionally, just fill up the hole with a main rail and break everything ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The worst crashes are vs perpendicular-rail Sliding Miners.

Parallel-rail SlM isn't that big of a problem (unless the main rails are very close to each other).

I also hate Medusa. Yep, that old, dead entry. It can really screw with my Highway sometimes.

I really liked Medusa - the random approach in particular, which allowed its workers to escape from loops. But it never scored well. And it does even worse with all that today's arena throws at it...

@trichoplax I didn't mean it literally. I like Medusa as an entry as well. Though its color palette can easily confuse Highway.

@Alion Don't worry I knew what you meant :)

Highway seems to handle Trail Eraser pretty well - especially once it gets ridiculous numbers of workers to throw at the problem...

@trichoplax Yeah, my only solution to trail-eraser is throw workers at it...

Speaking of which - I just discovered a funny bug in my logic. If there are enemies nearby, I don't paint anything as a Queen. Mistake. I just got a game where the Queen flew off to Hawaii after meeting a trail-eraser, ditching her current way of life. Recovered, by promptly got rekt because of the late start.

..turns out peer pressure took precedence over making a shaft. No wonder many shafts weren't made :p

@Alion SlM doesn't paint with enemies nearby sometimes, and only when there are miners backing it up

@dzaima Yea, but I assume that your Queen won't carelessly step off the main rail into white territory...

@Alion it might, in the hopes miners recover her

Looks like Highway could shake up the order of the rest of the leaderboard. Being able to survive having your entire world concreted over is becoming a deciding factor...

..and finally I encountered something I was hoping would never happen - an ant in front of the queen. Currently the queen never steps off the middle of the rail.

@dzaima Oh, I encountered that a long long time ago. The handling for that isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing.

Watching old Sliding Miners take the long route when they could continue their mine shaft forwards until they hit the rail again has me wondering. Could they use multiple colours in their mine shafts to encode how far they've travelled and whether it's better to go back or continue forward once laden? Difficult because the distance varies with vertical or horizontal mine shafts, but it got me thinking

@trichoplax Yep. Firefly, for example, is not having a great time.

I see what you mean about Medusa. It's turned Highway to stone.

Would it help if the laden workers did more repair work to cover cases like that?

@trichoplax it'd be pretty hard to encode enough information in the two colors its got available for that

I was wondering about using more than two colours - maybe two sets of 3 or 4

@trichoplax Laden workers are already doing a lot of repair work. The problem is that they can't repair anything towards the main rail, because it would be possible for them to miss the main rail (because it got broken/erased/repainted) and, as a result, start a new one when they meet the other side of the Highway.

Less relevant now Sliding Miners has mine shafts on both sides...

@Alion Ah of course - then you'd get the meandering join that happens when the outer edges meet

@trichoplax Worse - I might get a new main rail. The join wouldn't actually be much of a problem - someone would fix it eventually.

@trichoplax possible it might be, but useful - only 2x improvement (or less with more colors required), and bad for matching ability - very.

Fair enough. Stability beats winning by an unnecessary margin

It's a job best suited for workers traveling outwards - so all unladen ones.

Oh shit. Actually, unladen workers can and will travel towards the main rail in certain cases. Hmm, that could be the source of my problems...

Why wouldn't they be headed outwards? Do you mean taking one step inwards when they see an outward neighbour?

@trichoplax No, that hole healing you saw is caused by unladen workers tracing the edge. If the traced edge turns out to be going towards the main rail, they'll go there.

Oh

Will they notice the change in direction as they pass over the middle?

That is, do both worker types build correctly when on the wrong side of the rail?

SlM is having a bad time

@trichoplax They will build correctly if they're more convinced that they're on the wrong side (and will run towards the correct side), but all bets are off when they connect back to the other side not through the main rail.

Though, wait. They're tracing the edge, for Pete's sake. How could they miss the main rail...?

They can't detect the "handedness" of the pattern they are repairing somehow?

Interesting that laden workers race along the main rail until they come to a hole, and then just wait. Then when more laden workers arrive behind them they paint the main rail pattern back and race along again

Somehow Highway has covered the entire arena only 22000 moves in, in a full arena

@trichoplax I said that they can and will detect the "handedness" of the pattern, though how they connect to it is based on chance. I mean, let's say that a worker just somehow missed the main rail, and is on the wrong side. I can't guarantee how they connect to the wrong side when territory is well painted again.

@trichoplax Oh, I thought that only happens in solo games. How many workers? If more than 600, I'm not surprised.

328 + 326 + 1 at 27000 moves

1469 food :)

Yep, it can sometimes do that. Though it must've had particularly boring competition.

Or killed off strong competition in their infancy...

The strongest weren't in that one - did make a big difference. Gained another 3 food before the end, despite there being no more arena to explore. The sheer numbers of workers might have meant a few accidentally stole from other queens, or maybe there were laden workers that got detained for a while and eventually found their way back

The problem with trail-eraser is that I need ~2-3 workers to counter one of theirs...

Erasing can be made much more efficient than properly painting...

I think I saw 1 Highway worker holding still 1 Trail Eraser worker once, with colour painting, but usually it seems to take more

The problem is Trail Eraser can paint all the cells is sees white without having to waste time moving

....."Highway" seems to be a bit of a euphemism. The dominant life form is now rampant green slime. ;) (whistles "Ghost Busters" title theme, tips hat to @Alion)

Top I've seen so far: 1536 food (in a normally crowded arena) from 219+237+1 workers; many of the workers must still have been laden at the end and hardly any food in existence had not yet been picked up.

On an empty arena or in a game against others?

(It can take a laden worker more than a thousand steps to meet the queen again if she's halfway around the torus.) - On a normal game against 15 others.

Today was the first time I've seen all the food collected on a normal game

I believe it.

Yea, if it gets >200 workers total, there's hardly any way to stop it...

Just the sheer number of workers keeps it running.

I've also seen a couple of accidents... ultimately, it'll be the accident rates that will determine the new leaderboard rankings. (Have run only a dozen random games so far since reloading players from PPCG.)

On a different note: I've found code responsible for creating nearly all fake main rails. I don't have the juices to fix it right now, though...

Yes it's consistency that counts. This might take a while to converge...

Next on my plate is going to be Edgehugger. Formless, patternless, efficient goo? Sign me up.

Goodbye arena. It was nice knowing you

:-D

@trichoplax You're saying that like it's not an upgrade :P

:P

Must close that window now. I'm meant to be focusing on caching...

I'll spend the remaining evening watching my cacti grow, to calm down...

Yes this game is getting pretty violent. Not like the good old days :P

I haven't really thought about it, but yeah - Highway completely shuts down most entries that aren't well-prepared for mass tampering (if they didn't have it hard enough already).

I've just pushed a change to make the cache per game only. In Chromium this limits the RAM use to around half a GB, for not too much loss of speed. In Firefox it still seems to eat RAM, so I might have to look into forcing garbage collection

Lots of edited answers. Time to start a new parallel tournament...

I don't expect the current version of Highway to win, by the way. It would easily snatch the win if it was average food, but it's not. It's still too tamper-prone in the early stages.

It's a phenomenal first stage - looking forward to seeing the refinements once you've had a rest

In the meantime there's a tournament running so we can see where it starts out on the leaderboard

I've already ran 2 tournaments on Dave's. It seems to be hovering around 4th place...

Though ~50 games is not high enough to reliably measure its failure rate, so I'm looking forward to official results.

Yes it's surprising how much the order can change long term. My controller tries to indicate this with its joint places until it's fairly sure the order won't change. After 12,344 games, Glider and Lightspeed are still showing joint 1st (based on the versions from 14 Feb)

Also the official tournament excludes disqualified players (currently Steamroller and HalfThere), which can affect the order and also speeds up convergence as the other players can appear in more of the games

@trichoplax Hmm, I thought there was someone else DQ'd... Maybe just my imagination.

I think the others have all been fixed. Sliding Miners would be in theory due to the accidental console.log but I just made a one character fix instead (still haven't worked out why the controller didn't automatically disqualify, but I'm not looking into that as next on my list is overriding the behaviour of console.log anyway)

Any that are disqualified will have a comment from me on the answer, and I only delete it once they are edited to fix

I said I'd take a pseudo-break from this challenge, but really all I'm not doing is any programming. I'm still investigating and writing down issues, so I can fix them later. I can't get enough of this thing. This is addicting.

I can only apologise :P

Don't. I love this thing. This is also the first chance I had to share my code anywhere, so it's doubly exciting.

I'm delighted to be a part of that :)

5 Highway workers circling Wildfire, deadlocking everything. Reminds me of a pack of wolves, though non-carnivorous.

Designing the saboteur routine is fun, but I need to get back to the marching part of my submission at some point

I'm thinking of an alternative recovery procedure where the gatherer itself, after gathering the last bit of food, loops back around and assists the end in straightening itself out

Currently on the backburner is a way for a saboteur to avoid retracing patterns it's already sabotaged by detecting its own characteristic splotchy pattern

It sounds like things are going to get a whole lot meaner than Trail Eraser soon then :)

I've managed to add 11 positions to my to-do list. It's gonna be a hell of an entry if (when?) I cover all those cases.

Problem hunting is pretty hard when I encounter the same problems over and over again...

I'm sure there are more problems further down the line - I can't get to them, though, because more common problems are taking precedence.

@Alion Done

Vampire breaks off, despite me not telling it to, but all it has to do is come back around to it

@Draco18s Yikes! That was quick.

Does it leave the Highway in shambles, or can it continue work?

oh the highway is maintained :D

hey

It gets the occasional Forever Alone line through it, but that's easily repaired

@Draco18s That looks sorely misshapen. Does Vampire stop the Queen from running?

that's actually a crash scenario, the Highway queen isn't next to Vampire, so she's being leeched (and spending food on new workers) and Vampire isn't moving either

but the first encounter was near the center

where you can see some random vampire workers

But it took a large portion of the game for that to happen

@GrahamMiranda Hi, what's up?

@Alion game ended, Vampire with 1164 food

going to run some tourneys now

while I play Pathfinder

@Draco18s An effective parasite leaves its host healthy :)

yes!

Windmill I had no way to retreat away from. Highway I didn't write any code to retreat from, it just happened.

MoaR the retreat code is...about 40% effective

MoaR targeting code is adapted to the new sliding miners, right?

I dunno why it's now called sliding miners, but okay...

I haven't adapted for SlM yet

@eaglgenes101 the queen now slides forwards, before it just stayed in place :p

@eaglgenes101 Before, the miners had to run further to get back to the queen. Now she stays just ahead of them, moving along as new mine shafts are built, so they have shorter journeys and can gather more food

"Highway"? More like "Apocalypse by checkerboard pattern"!

(loosely speaking)

@eaglgenes101 Relevant @GNiklasch comment

I'm starting to think "Highway" is not a well chosen name...

But "Rampant Green Slime" doesn't roll off the tongue. "Apocalypse" might be a more appropriate name, though... I'll consider it.

Also, cache flushing would be a good idea in the controller. Otherwise the controller leaks memory slowly but surely as games go on

Possibly with a 3rd-level between-game cache?