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

Zero X Präsentation

Am Mittwoch 14. April 2010 werde ich die Gelgenheit haben Zero X der Ruby on Rails Usergroup Schweiz vorstellen zu können.

Zero X ist ein Ruby Programming Game. Wie in solchen Games üblich, spielen die User nicht direkt gegeneinander. Stattdessen programmiert jeder Spieler ein Agenten Progamm, das dann gegen die anderen Agenten antritt. Die Agent in Zero X sind in eine simulierte Welt eingebettet, die kleine ökologische Systeme abbilden. Ziel ist es, dass die eigenen Agenten in diesem System überleben oder gar die anderen übertrumpfen können,

Freue mich jetzt schon auf spannende Diskussionen...

Mehr Infos unter www.zero-x.net

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.

Free Actions

Release 0.9.5 introduces two new actions. Both are free, means, they don't take any actions costs.

First with info you can now store messages during your agents think method. Later you can analyse them in the reports of the game reviews. All messages saved this way are private. Only the owner of the agent can see them.

info 'my secret debug info'

Second is time. Time simply returns the time units elapsed since the game has been started.

time # => time_units in floats

This is the last release before the first tournament will take place.

The documentation and the SDK have been updated.