My whole plan is to have a giant formation marching around and half speed

Believe me, it's hard enough to conceptualize it when it's the core of your strategy

Trying to integrate it into another strategy and getting them to play nice is would require more brainpowertime than a coding challenge deserves

heh, good luck

There's no food left for anyone

Workers in nests tend to be programmed to dogpile enemy workers to prevent food theft

This frequently leads to hilarious pileups when rails cross

@Draco18s that meme was erased from history for good reason :P

@trichoplax :P

Vampiric updates, its less good in the tournament, now that Highway and SlM exist, but it's still keeping the two of them suppressed

I'm still glad I included food stealing. Makes each game a battle rather than just a race

@GNiklasch With per game cache I'm seeing no problems in Chromium, which is what I use for tournaments anyway since it's faster. I'm going to focus on making console logging work for a cached new challenger first, then come back to see if I can fix the memory problems, in which case I'll go back to persistent cache over a whole tournament.

Thinking about it, I wonder if a cache per game would help decide which moves to cache longer term - keeping what's in common to multiple games

@Alion Highway is hovering around 4th place so far. Need to start a new parallel tournament when I get home too, as there have been player updates

@Draco18s I've just finished reading the transcript - I thought I'd made the name length limit sufficiently generous but I hadn't counted on descriptive names for updates... I'll be starting the new tournament for this in about 12 hours.

@eaglgenes101 This challenge has already eaten up more "brainpowertime" than it deserves from multiple people, myself included...

...and I don't regret it one bit.

@dzaima The "skip to" button works great! I appreciate it.

Okay. I've identified 3 issues responsible for the vast majority of failures, and fixing all of them shouldn't be too hard. Today is also the day I resume work on Highway, so I'm aiming for a new update until the end of the week.

@Alion it was my easier way to implement state saving & loading :p

Oof. I think Highway will need a mass-refactoring for the third time already. That's what I get for writing code without a well thought-out plan...

Oh, and I'll introduce a new idea to my findOrientation function while I'm at it: certainty. It will be a value that represents the difference between how many cells of a pattern matched and the next best match count. That means that if 2 different orientations matched with the same match count, it'll have a certainty of 0. Those will be the fundaments for high quality pattern matching (I hope).

It will allow me to paint the sides when as little as 4 cells match, as long as the certainty is high enough.

@Alion ooh, smart

though what do you do as a worker when you're not confident enough?

@dzaima I don't paint anything, so as to not make more work for future workers. I still try to trace the edge of what I know (essentially educated random walk, when hits is lower than 4), until I'm confident again.

...I think that's what happens. Though my codebase is in a state of disarray, so I'll have to check later.

My goal right now is to clean up and add the aforementioned functionality to my framework. Then I'll refactor my code, probably throwing away a lot of bloat, organizing things better, adding meaningful comments, implementing desired behavior, removing bugs, etc...

By the time I'm finished probably half a week will have passed, and I'll have a much cleaner code base and a much more resilient entry (if all goes according to plan, that is, though I have been surprisingly consistent in doing what I set out to do lately).

I'll push an update after all that, and try to figure something out against Mr. Vampire...

Wow, this turned into a rant. Whoops.

@trichoplax I'm only continuing a theme, that update just happened to have two major changes in it

I never expected players getting regular updates spread over months. Certainly not complaining :)

IKR?

Here's an idea: tax collector worker type. Pseudo-randomly traverses the Highway, searching for subjugated Queens with leftover food. Then, he travels to the sides to bring unladen workers back to the Queen to tax her for sitting on the Highway. Repeatedly.

This sounds so evil that I might actually do it.

pfft

How does the tax collector decide how many unladen workers to redirect?

how do unladen workers know that they should be traveling Down and not Up?

@Draco18s Details. I'll end up reusing lots of worker types. One is not enough.

/me is good at making details important

I'll think this over when I get back to my PC.

@Alion a rant is angry. That's just a long update. Pretty interesting one too

After this ant challenge is up, I'd like to see a termite challenge, where all workers are state machines with direction and move simultaneously

@trichoplax Whoops again. English isn't my native language. Good to know!

I look forward to having to fix Vampire to target a robustly defended Highway

@eaglgenes101 I think @trichoplax has another KOTH planned already, one with such movement

Does it have a sandbox entry?

I believe so

@Draco18s It wasn't on meta, last time I checked. It's a great idea, though.

The rough description that I remember was that it was a maze in a (25x25? or was that the vision size of the agents?) grid, where the "goal" position is invisible. Every turn agents get to move (but may not occupy the same space) and a random unoccupied space is filled in (such that all spaces can still reach the goal). Agents have memory and the winner is the agent that is standing on the goal when the game is done (presumably when no more cells can be blocked off)

I don't think that's one of mine. There is a pheromone based one, but that's not mine and it's seeking a new owner

That one wasn't yours? Hmm...

thought it was...

No that one is. I'm on mobile with poor signal. I should have replied direct to the message I was responding to...

:D

We need to get turmites going, if they're not in the sandbox already...

@eaglgenes101 I like the sound of that.

There's always more space in the sandbox

GAH Flails

Glider - Draco18s Exceeded permitted time averaged over more than 10 seconds.

On my controller?

Hopefully that doesn't mean I'll get home to more caching problems...

@eaglgenes101 Do you plan on posting a preliminary proposal to the sandbox? If so, I'd love to participate in the shaping of that challenge.

@trichoplax My controller, but same caching code

I think the browser was busy doing Other Things for a bit

Keep in mind, it's been running for a week without any disqualifications

@Draco18s The simple solution for this (only one ant type). Pseudo-random forward walk. When taxable queen found, get food from her (automatic). When the tax collector is laden and has no worker beside him, travel away from the main rail, until something that looks like an edge is hit. Wait for an unladen worker to come. Go with the worker back towards the chosen queen (you can just travel towards the main rail now to find her again). (cont...)

Unladen worker steals food and transports it back to our queen. Repeat until target has 0 food. Tax collector then travels alongside the laden worker that just stole the last piece of food to give the queen one more food and reset behavior.

Would be slow, but yes, that would work

Depends on amount of tax collectors, but per tax collector, yes.

Hmm, unless I come back to the main rail to grab our queen so she will essentially vampire the poor thing...

sure

That would be inefficient. Highway queen gets 1 food every 12 or so steps already

taking her away from the main rail makes all of the standard workers unable to find her

Hmm, good point.

Now that I think about it, when the rail is vertical, it might be more efficient to not tax Queens...

This is a late game strat, and in the late game, workers would have to travel hundreds of cells just to get one piece of food from the queen.

Oh, no, it's worth it - they get closer to the main rail, so they will put the food back faster too.

If I created enough of these tax collectors, I could make the leaderboards look like this: 15-0-0-0-0[...]

@Alion wait what, this is backwards. Your edges grow farther and farther from the main rail faster than if its horizontal

Well, almost. Some ants can't be caught, actually.

@Draco18s Yea, and most of the competition will be stuck near our main rail. And I'm going to be grabbing workers off the edges, remember?

(Vampire, sometimes, steamroller, glider, pierce, etc)

@Alion Hmm... hard to evaluate without data

@Draco18s Right. Well, this idea is a while away for now anyway. I'll try it out when I fix the more important problems.

mhm

I could also improve detection rates for tax collectors by following pockets of wrongly-colored rail. I need to be careful with that, though, because some pockets might lead nowhere.

probably quite a few

Glider broken wings leave red trails

seriously considers adding vampiric-like behavior to Glider...just to sap Highway

I could always follow-erase pockets.

Which will never catch the queen (if there is one): any pocket that is 1 cell in size will be being drawn at the same speed the worker erases

@Draco18s Please don't actually do that. That's not in the spirit of Glider... and also because of my own selfish reasons

You can already see this when one of your workers finds one of glider's broken trails

@Alion Yes, I agree.

On both points

@Alion Would this stop working when the whole arena is covered in green goo?

@Draco18s Yup, I did notice that behavior. Hmm, I could try and erase more at once...

@trichoplax Erm, no, I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't. The "edge" doesn't actually have to border with white - it can border with nonsense colors as well and still be detectable. Besides, workers alongside the edge are in the hundreds - just catching one randomly wouldn't be unheard of.

Both edges just ovewrite each other when they come in contact

they give no ducks

And that reminds me - I should figure out a way to gracefully handle edge collision...

They make a meandering river like a geography textbook. I guess that's still a perfectly good place to wait and signal unladen workers

Yep yep

And I never thought Highway would work prior to its initial discussion (i.e. my assumed assumptions about pattern based designs). The only reason it DOES is because it overwhelms the competition with numbers of workers.

ie. Highway's number of unladen workers > all other ants combined

@Draco18s That's the point. Use the overwhelming efficiency advantage. Well, I guess it doesn't out-efficiency Windmill, but it's not too interested in spawning masses of workers.

*fingers the "restrict worker count" setting in his controller

And vs someone as interested in spawning masses of workers, like SlM, it can hold its own fairly well.

@Draco18s Good there wasn't a worker limit in the first place :P

Efficiency is impressive, but at the end of the game there are no points for it.

SlM is less robust in its patterning than Highway

@trichoplax Very true! Which is why the occasional successful vampire can wreck its performance against something more consistent like Glider

@Draco18s Main rail of SlM is significantly more robust than Highway's. Shafts... not so much.

@Alion The main rail CAN get duplicated by lost workers, which causes problems. But yes, the main rail can always be repaired if any portion of its location is known

Though SlM's workers don't really care if they lost their original shaft, so destructive power is still great.

SlM's lost workers creating a new main rail "above" the main rail: even more lost workers

@Draco18s Well, Highway's main rail can get duped as well, still... Hoping to fix that in the next update.

mhm

@trichoplax Shame that you don't get points for worker counts :c

Reverse! That would be horrible, actually.

Haha yes. That doesn't have the same interesting trade off as counting stored food though...

If anything you'd score some value X as food for each worker, which affects almost no positions on the table (until X < 0, hmm, I might be interested in testing that just for giggles)

@Draco18s Ooh, X < 0 would test efficiency, essentially.

No, Food / Workers would

X < 0 would just be as if workers took more than 1 food to create

@Draco18s With the caveat that you can go negative.

without having to go into the controller and every entry and change their worker spawning code to check food counts

Switching topics: I think Firefly could actually be competitive if it was its original orthogonal self (minus all the bugs and plus food hoarding). Shame QuoteBeta isn't working on it anymore...

Tournament started 14 Feb: 13676 games played. Lightspeed and Glider in joint 1st place still. Lightspeed currently ahead 13.69 to 13.68 (they've been swapping places for weeks...)

@trichoplax Good grief. That one will never converge, will it?

Tournament started 3 Mar: 1721 games played. Glider, Sliding Miners, Lightspeed, and Windmill in joint 1st place with 13.73, 13.70, 13.57, and 13.35

@Alion option 1: make an edit that fixes its current bug with food and erasure. Option 2: take the food hoarding from the current and apply it back to its original orthogonal arrangement.

@Alion doesn't seem like it

@trichoplax LS and Windmill are far enough down that they'll probably end up joint-second after some more time.

@Alion I know! I thought that old tournament was going to be my back up to decide the winner if the newer tournaments didn't converge in time for the bounty, but I think a newer one will probably converge first...

Tournament started 4 Mar: 285 games played. Page frozen. When it died there were 7 players in joint first place, Glider and Lightspeed at the top

No time out disqualifications this time. Less than half a GB of RAM used. But the page is unresponsive

odd

@Draco18s Meh, I don't want to dabble in someone's code. I'd love to rebuild it from scratch, though, when I find some time. The current tilted version is different enough to allow for a non-tilted variation, I think. What do you think, @trichoplax? I'd of course credit the guy for the original idea.

"Provided the game is not flooded with many near-identical variations, there should be no problem."

@Alion I'd try commenting on the answer first - if you get a response then that'll be the best guide. After that you're free to post answers based on other answers with credit. I love seeing how an idea can be reused and made into something new

@trichoplax Oh, good point. I won't go and do that now, though, because there's still at least a half a month of work ahead of me.

(You're free to post a new answer whether you comment or not - I just meant that if you comment there's a chance you might be invited to edit the existing answer)

@Alion It'd go through the edit queue and QuoteBeta would have final say on it. A simple bug fix would probably be approved

@Draco18s There's a cryptic pootis(p) in his code. No, thank you.

Ziggurat was originally similar (I think it had a non-tilted version, then a tilted version, then its current sprawling version). Black Hole went the other way, starting out circular and then becoming more straight sided

Oh, okay, I think I know what it does... Still, I don't think I want to essentially reverse-engineer his answer.

@trichoplax Oh yeah, I remember one super old screenshot with some light-colored Firefly with it. I think it was magenta, yellow, lime?

@trichoplax The circle shape was due to a bug, actually!

Just to clarify: Quote Beta made Monorail. FireFly was by Moogie

@Draco18s It was so cool, though. And you went and ruined it :c

I liked the circle too. I assume it was less efficient though, as it would mean drawing less often

@trichoplax Oh, what?! I could've sworn that Firefly was QuoteBeta's...

I had to look it up myself - I have a lot of players to keep track of nowadays...

I'm going to start a tournament in Firefox instead. Even though I haven't stopped it eating silly amounts of memory yet, I'll see if it will stay below my limit so at least I can get results, even if a little slower

Yeah, no. I can't decipher Firefly, and fixing that bug wouldn't really change its effectiveness on the arena...

@Alion Yeah, but it caused a problem in a particular scenario, and when I fixed that problem, it wasn't circular any more

@Draco18s Meh. Black hole is just a fat line on the arena now, anyway.

yeah

Oh, and I've been thinking about Edgehugger for a while, and it seems that it will suffer from that problem too, just to a lesser degree.

The thing is - you can't tell a 3-wide line from a blob regardless of whether or not you're on the inside or the outside.

on the outside, you can at least tell you're on the out side

That means that, since I can't trust BH to be roughly blob-shaped, I will have to use a different color so the two don't combine.

@Draco18s That's right.

And blue, since BH likes to spew this one as well.

Let's see...

White, Black, Blue, Red...what other colors get blobby?

Green: Brownian Jig

@Draco18s Well, but that one is literally blobby, so it's usable.

Cyan+Blue+Black is CalustroQ's. Yellow+Magenta is Hoppemaur. But they're also blobby

It'll be interesting to see a Highway vs Edgehugger scenario...

nod

SlM: 32, Vamp: 192 food. Less than ideal in terms of "leaving the victim healthy", but as I wanted to get the update out quick I didn't worry about such things. Not sure what is going wrong on SlM's side though