Since we can’t post to the newsgroup, I need to reply to your comment there here. Looking at the way the submissions are going, time is less of a concern now than it was before, although I think it’s still something to try to find a solution to because it’s forced us into a ‘tweak war’. Interestingly enough, the contest system is very sensitive to the random inputs. Very slight changes in the random thresholds are producing very large reductions in the results, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in previous contests. Unfortunately that probably meaning we’ll degenerate into a queue spamming at some point. I’m not sure there is anything that can be done about this, although I know if previous contests there have been a lot of suggestions on how to minimize the effect of the random variable seeds.

It’s surprisingly short and simple to understand. Hopefully this will make it less intimidating for those of you wanted to jump in and compete over the weekend.

Credit goes to Nick Howe I believe who originally submitted this basic algorithm in his Cowardly Lion entry, which was subsequently improved upon by SY and David Jones before I took a stab at it.

I have to say I’m very impressed that the run times of the leading entries have dropped so significantly. We’re now at the 60s mark, which surprises me a lot. I guess I need to dig around in the profiler a bit more to understand why this is.

Also, thanks to Doug for a great video presentation on the king of the hill.