The battle in CodeCombat between 545 programmers is over



    On Habré already talked about the wonderful game CodeCombat , which helps to learn Javascript in a fun way. But in the battle of Greed , it was by no means beginners who encountered, but real professionals.

    During the competition, 545 participants wrote over 126,000 lines of code. Each spent an average of 10 hours preparing tasks, which corresponds to 7.5 person-months of development. The calculation of the outcome took place on the 673-core cluster, which in one hour calculated the result of all 153,439 games. Winners will collect prizes worth more than $ 40,000.

    Absolute champion Wizard Duke showed a completely unique result: 363 wins, 0 losses, 14 draws. In an interview with the organizers, 23-year-old English programmer Michael Heasell explained his coin collection strategy . The player’s motion vector was calculated as the sum of the vectors generated by the surrounding coins, depending on their value, and vectors of the opposite direction from the boundaries of the game zone and fellow coin collectors. The result of adding all the vectors showed which way the collector should make the next move.

    Thus, the Wizard Duke collectors moved towards the most dense clusters with valuable coins, evenly distributed over the territory.

    In addition, the value of the coin was also calculated taking into account its distance to the nearest enemy, in order to maximize profits.

    His unit production strategy is also quite complex. Michael used an advanced categorization architecture to prioritize the types and subtypes of autonomous bot behavior. For example, one of the types of behavior is sensing. Some players build a large army in response to the appearance of any aggressor. To check the enemy, Wizard Duke sent the only soldier in the middle of the game to the enemy’s base.

    Record the tense battle between the Wizard Duke player and the Canadian Bellardia clan here . Interestingly, from the middle of the game session, coin collectors from opposite sides move almost synchronously in pairs, which indicates the similarity of the strategies that Wizard Duke and Bellardia used.

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