[Icfp04-discuss] gb0505 performance against roadcrew and others

[William Harold Newman]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 05:31:17PM -0500, James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2004, at 11:16 AM, Tomas G. Rokicki wrote:
> 
> >And what's even funnier is when I run your ant against roadcrew, I've 
> >got
> >you winning 16-4 . . .
> 
> Yeah, I think you've got a more solid ant than you do.  Maybe there's a 
> bug or two in your simulator.  I too see you beating my ant (Road Crew) 
> handily.

gb0505 did actually beat roadcrew in my first 1-on-1 test (an occasion
much rejoicing:-) but I continued gathering ant opponents, and in the
larger field I reported gb0505 didn't do as well as roadcrew. So my
simulator *could* have a bug, but it doesn't seem to follow from
1-on-1 results, where mine are consistent with yours. I suspect the
difference is that gb0505 has absolutely no clue about defense. In the
presence of competitors that are good at stealing gb0505's food and/or
killing its ants, the absence of features like roadcrew's vault could
be really expensive...

I just finished another unscientifically sampled tournament (yet
larger this time: all the all_ants.zip file entries with names
[c-n]*.ant, plus a few entries I had heard of like redteam, roadcrew,
and z25, minus a few .ant files my parser or simulator barfed on, on
world 2 only) and roadcrew took 19th place, while gb0505 took 26th
place (out of 37). Tentative conclusion: next year I should use more
syllables in my program's name like the winner did.:-)

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman at airmail.net>
"It takes two to lie, Marge -- one to lie and one to listen." -- Homer Simpson
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