Starting 3rd Zero X Season

On July 7 2012 we start the 3rd Zero-X season. This will be the first season with
the new level "Clone War". The best agents of the 2nd season will be among the first participants.
For now this are Virgina, Say Cheese, Scorpion King and Unexist.

But don't worry as soon as you accomplish the first level "Greenfields", you get
immediately access to the next level. The conditions are still the same:
You need to participate in a least 5 tournaments and win 40 points.

Looking forward to see the first winners.

Winner of 2nd Season Greenfields

Wood Elf strikes again! The winner of the 1st Zero X season is also the winner of 2nd season.

In the 2nd season disengage was introduced and the combat damage, was changed in the favor of the attacker and therefore rewarded a more aggressive behaviour. But little has changed here as a look at the ranking list shows.

As announced at the beginning of this season: you will need an agent with at least an average of 4.0 EPS and 5 tournaments to get to next level "Clone War". Here are the top five agents, who achieved that goal:

6.62 Wood Elf
6.08 Mild Gruyere
6.08 Bulldog
5.66 Rincewind
4.24 Gruyere

The usual suspects at the top, let's have a look at the agents that have won more than one tournament:

1st places
3 Rincewind
2 Wood Elf
2 Bulldog
2 Oreiller

At first glance it looks surprising that Oreiller didn't made it for the next level with two 1st places. But taking a closer look we can see, that it didn't perform very well between the 2nd and 6th tournament. I'm sure he will join soon as well as Tentacle Cat, both are only a few points away.

In the next few blog posts I want to take a closer look at all the new features of the new level Clone War and introduce them step by step.

www.zero-x.net

The End of Season 1

The 10th tournament ended actually with two winners, Bulldog and Rincewind. Both made 6.8 points, Bulldog is only ranked first, because he has a better overall ranking.

After 10 tournaments, it's time to look back. The first tournament began with 9 agents, by now the agents have doubled. They not only have become more, no they also have become better. FireLion the winner of the first two tournaments, looked in the beginning very promising, but in the meanwhile has been displaced to the 10th rank. Others have come with a better strategy.

After total 46 games, the ranking list can grouped in three parts:
There's the 5plus group, agents that have an average of more than 5 points. Means they don't only survive in most of the games, the also achieve better ranks. WoodElf, Bulldog, Gruyere, Oreiller, Mild Gruyere and Rincewind are in this group.
The second group are agents that survive sometimes, they have an average of 3 to 4 points. And then there's the last group that have less than 3 points, meaning they don't survive very often.

But remember this tournaments are not only about winning or loosing, in fact I don't see any loosing in contributing an agent. It's about to figure out which strategy works better then another.

After 10 tournaments we make a break and end the first season. We will continue the tournaments in October, the exact date will be announced.

Congratulations to everybody and see you soon for the second season!

Bulldog wins 9th tournament

Bulldog won the 9th tournament with 8.0 points. He won 2 games, made one second place and a third place.
Wood Elf, the high flyer of the last tournament, made this time only 4.6 points and was placed at rank 6, still holding the first rank in the total ranking.
Newcomer Mild Gruyere won 1 game and is placed 4th in the tournament ranking.

I'm still experimenting with the runtime velocity of the simulation. This time the simulation run even slower, the action cost to time unit ratio was 1/15. Like this the resource reached their maximum at the end of each game. I think will keep the action costs in this range for the next tournament.

class Agency < Tournament::Agency
  level 'Greenfields'
  agents_per_game 22
  games_per_agent 1
  game_duration 300 # sec
  time_unit 45 # sec
  action_cost_time_unit_ratio 1.0 / 15.0
  build_options 'Greenfields::World' => { :size => 8 },
                'Greenfields::Resource' => { :size => 4000..16000 },
                'Greenfields::Population' => { :size => 40..160 }
end

Ranking of the 9th tournament.

High-Flyer

Incredible! Wood Elf makes the perfect tournament with 10 points! This means she won all 5 games in the tournament. Having a look at the rankings of Wood Elf, we see that, in the 4 tournaments she participated, she won 3 of them and made a second place in the other. This is clear an outstanding performance.
She now leads the overall ranking with 7.85 points, leaving the second placed Gruyere with 5.69 points behind.

The world size for this tournament has now been increased by one to eight. And the simulation run even slower, one time unit now took 30 seconds.
Here the whole configuration for the last tournament:

module Greenfields

  class Agency < Tournament::Agency
    level 'Greenfields'
    agents_per_game 22
    games_per_agent 5
    game_duration 1800 # sec
    time_unit 30 # sec
    action_cost_time_unit_ratio 1.0 / 10.0
    build_options 'Greenfields::World' => { :size => 8 },
                  'Greenfields::Resource' => { :size => 4000..16000 },
                  'Greenfields::Population' => { :size => 40..160 }
  end

end

Ranking of the 8th tournament.

The 5th and 6th Tournament

For the last two tournaments there were 5 games each and 16 agents, who participated.
We had an amazing newcomer "Wood Elf", who left with 7.8 EPS all other behind. In the 5th tournament Wood Elf won 2 games, made a second and a third place. But she also takes the first place in the overall ranking. FireLion falls back to the third place.

In the 6th tournament, Gruyere strikes for the second time. One game won, 3 times a second place and one third place, gives him excellent 8 EPS. Gruyere takes now the second place in the overall ranking. Will he become number one in the tournaments to come or can Wood Elf defend her position?

As in the last post announced the simulation runned slower for the last two tournaments. The action cost to time unit ratio has been set to 1/4. Also the world size has been increased and has now a size of 7. Here the complete configuration for the last tournament:

module Greenfields

  class Agency < Tournament::Agency
    level 'Greenfields'
    agents_per_game 16
    games_per_agent 5
    game_duration 1800 # sec
    time_unit 12 # sec
    action_cost_time_unit_ratio 1.0 / 4.0
    build_options 'Greenfields::World' => { :size => 7 },
                  'Greenfields::Resource' => { :size => 4000..16000 },
                  'Greenfields::Population' => { :size => 40..160 }

  end

end

Checkout the the ranking.

Decoupling action costs from time units

The first tournaments showed, that the resources grow too fast. Fields with no population reach soon the maximum of their capacity and when an agent fights another agent, it can recover from the combat damage in no time.
As SayCheese pointed out, at the time the game is stopped, the winner is more or less random, as all survived populations are more or less at their maximum. Actually there's no real fight for the best remaining resources.

To bring some more challenge in the game, the simulation should run a little bit slower, while the agents still have the same time for their actions. Therefor the action costs will be decoupled from the time units in the simulation. Action costs are now a fraction of a time unit. A look_around doesn't take 2 time units anymore, but 2 action costs.
For the next tournament an action cost will be a quarter of a time unit. Means the simulation will run 4 times slower until now. In consequence the resources and the populations will grow 4 times slower.

Surprise in the 4th tournament

The 4th tournament comes with a surprising winner: The Good, a demo agent.

How could a random agent win this tournament? Does this prove, that the whole tournament is just a random game, doesn't it?! I don't think so!
Rather I think, that we reached a turning point.

In this 4th tournament 14 agents participated, most of them optimised to go for the best resource. As everyone wants the best resource, the only question remains, who gets it first. However all too often two or more agents saw the same field, that seemed to be free, and so they decided to move there. Leading in an unintentional attack against another agent, who had the same idea, but was a little bit faster moving.
This effect was aggravated by the fact, that the small 6x6 matrix was quite crowded with 14 agents. More than a third of the fields were occupied.

While everyone stumbled over each other, The Good just walked to a random free field, which was with the utmost probability better than the one he came from, but not necessarily the one with the best resources. Like this he could grow without being bothered by anybody.

Though The Good could not convince. He achieved only 5.75 points, meaning in 3 games he got only the minimum of 5 points and 8 points for a second place. As comparison Fire Lion and Gruyere won theire past tournaments with 9 points!

But for all that, we can learn a thing from this tournament. If the matrix gets too crowded, going only for the best resource may not necessarily be the best strategy, the second best may be better.

Gruyere wins 3rd tournament

The 3rd tournament brings a new winner. Gruyere wins 3 of 4 games and is placed 3rd in the fourth one. Last time Gruyere made only 3.25 points, this time excellent 9.

The newcomer of this tournament is Rincewind. He wins one game, one 2nd place one 3rd place. He achieved the 2nd place in the tournament and takes the 3rd place in the total ranking.

What happened to Fire Lion? In this tournament he dies in 2 games, and gets only 5 points in the other two games. Still he can defend his first place in the total ranking. But the question is now, for how long?

In this tournament a new thread scheduler came into operation. Now all agent threads are synchronized before they can execute an action like look around or move. Like this some raceconditions, that happend last time, could be avoided.

See the tournament Ranking

Fire Lion wins again

Fire Lion wins also the second tournament and keeps the lead. One first place, a second place and two third places out of 4 games.
But we have also two impressive newcomers, Dirty Harry on the second place and Appenzeller on the third place. Each of them have won a game. Tentacle Cat last time on the second place, is now placed fourth, even if it also won one game.

In this second tournament we had now 12 agents. The parameters were the same as in the last tournament, expect that the world size has been increased to 6.

See the tournament rankings

And the winner is ...

We had 9 agents in this first tournament, each participated to 4 games. A game took 30 min or 360 time units.

Fire Lion won 2 games and was placed second in the other two games. He clearly gains the lead! Congratulations!
See the entire ranking list here.

Here the setup parameters for the tournament:

module Greenfields

  class Agency < Tournament::Agency
    level 'Greenfields'
    agents_per_game 12
    games_per_agent 4
    game_duration 1800 # sec
    time_unit 5.0  # sec
    build_options 'Greenfields::World' => { :size => 5 },
                  'Greenfields::Resource' => { :size => 4000..16000 },
                  'Greenfields::Population' => { :size => 40..160 }
  end

end

The resources and the populations had the following properties:

resource :capacity => 100000, :birth_rate => 0.15, :death_rate => 0.05
population :birth_rate => 0.2, :death_rate => 0.05, :hunting_rate => 0.05, :needed_food => 2.0

What are your observations for this first tournament?

First Tournament

The frist agents have gathered for the first tournament. And we are curious to see the very first winner on:

29. March 2010

See it on Zero X.