Redcoders Frenzy   

The Big Sibling Round

Organiser: Achille Astolfi (LAchi)


Rules:

Coresize: 8000
Max. processes: 8000
Max. cycles: 80000
Max. length: 100
Min. distance: 100
Rounds: 4*250


3 warriors fight: self against 2 known warriors, special scoring rules.

Paper-The-Bully is always teasing your Little Sibling the Stone, and killing it in the game... now this is your job as a Big Sibling: kill The Bully and save your Little Sibling!

You are always rewarded if the Little Sibling survives. But to maximize the happiness of your family, you must both kill the Bully and survive until the end of the fight!

The opponents:

Paper-The-Bully is acted by the paper in Revenge of the Papers, while your Little Sibling is acted by Silver Bullet. Click on the links to download the code.

The Scores:

The following command line will be issued 4 times:

pmars -bk -r 250 bully.red little.red big.red

(where big.red is your entry). Then for each round:

You get 6 points if the Bully dies and both your warrior and the Little Sibling survive.
You get 3 points if only the Little Sibling survive (a little reward for your sacrifice).
You get 2 points if all the warriors survive (you have another chance to save your Little Sibling).
You get 1 point if your Little Sibling and the Bully survive (a minimum reward for your sacrifice).
You get 0 points if your Little Sibling dies (all the others).

How to compute the score without a modified pMARS:

If you execute the pmars command as above, you get a result like this:
1176 127 36 8 79
276 17 31 8 194
532 62 7 8 173
the first row is the Bully, the second row is the Little sibling, the third row is Big, your entry. The first column is the "standard" score, the second column is how many times the warrior was the only survivor, the third column is how many times the warrior was one of two survivors, the fourth column is how many times the warrior was one of three survivors, the last column is how many times the warrior did not survive.

Now you know for sure that Little was the only survivor for 17 times, and that all the warriors survived together for 8 times, but how for the rest? Well, say x is the times of Bully+Little survived, y of Bully+Big and z of Little+Big; we know from the third column that:
x+y=36
x+z=31
y+z=7
This system is always resolvable, and the solution is simple to compute. First you sum the known values and divide by 2: (36+31+7)/2 = 37; magic: this is the sum of x+y+z! So if you subtract the known value of a row from the sum, you get how many times the other two warriors survived together!

In short: calculate half of the sum of the third column (36+31+7)/2 = 37; then subtract the "Bully" value from the result, and you get 37-36 = 1: this means that Little and Big survived together only once! Subtract the "Big" value from the result: 37-7 = 30: this means that Bully and Little survived together 30 times!

So the total score in this case is 1*6 + 17*3 + 8*2 + 30*1 = 103.

The Hints:

The kofacoto round 4 is a good start! Anyway the scoring method there was different.

The results of Bully against Little Sibling on a 1000 rounds fight are 886 103 11.

A very specific vampire seems a good idea for this round.

The Entries:

2 entries for each participant. The deadline is April 1st, 2004. I chose this date because that was most liked by A.K.Dewdney ;)

Send your entries to achillu@tin.it

I am going to participate, too. So if you trust in me, send your entries whenever you want. If you do not trust, please wait until I have developed mine and sent them to the notary ;) I will give a public notice on r.g.c. when my entries will be done.

The Results:

I got 13 entries by 9 authors. I expected many evolved entries, instead there were none! Most entries are a specific vamp/scanner, even if we had alternative entries such as vamp/papers, one imp, and one suicide. No P-spacers.

This time we had two "legal cheats". The suicide entry is going to collect points anyway (exactly the score of Little Sibling against the Bully: 3 pts for each win and 1 pt for each tie). The other "legal cheat" is more subtle: the participant sent two copies of the same warrior. For statistic reasons, one of them would score more than average.

1000 rounds seemed to be enough: the test entry being the "legal cheat", the difference in score was just about 1%, so I think that the results can be reliable.

Here you can find the raw results; they were computed by this Java program using Java SDK 1.4.1. Here is the compiled class if you only have the Java RE 1.4.1.

Little:SurvivedDiedBig Sibling Round Entries
Bully:DSDS
Big:SDSDSD
#%%%%%%%NameAuthorScore%
146.43.09.011.40.11.628.5Wing Man 2Chip Wendell3168100.0
246.62.77.610.70.02.030.4Wing Man 1Chip Wendell313699.0
343.96.48.96.30.01.533.01984David Houston306796.8
439.46.914.76.25.04.623.2MayiiDavid Houston292792.4
535.83.118.61.50.71.239.1April FoolRoy van Rijn262883.0
634.72.820.11.70.91.738.1Fooled AgainRoy van Rijn258581.6
730.58.513.07.94.98.726.5The Rescue Team Strikes BackChristian Schmidt242476.5
817.05.021.08.80.49.238.6DTMsB [Don't Touch My (small/little) Brother!]Zul Nadzri167853.0
914.96.421.410.82.18.336.1DTMbB [Don't Touch My (big) Brother!]Zul Nadzri162251.2
100.30.567.40.90.025.85.1ImpetLukasz Adamowski139043.9
110.40.151.00.20.247.50.6No resourcesGerman Labarga104933.1
120.011.40.01.00.00.087.6annoying little brotherSimon Wainwright35211.1
130.08.03.72.41.35.778.9Res-QAchille Astolfi33810.7