That AdsRiskbot is a very strong bot. If your bot knows how to play then South America + Africa is (if the opponent doesen't start in North Africa) stronger than Australia + Africa. This is because you can use the leftovers coming from taking South America.

Beautiful 3rd game against Ad, GreenTea. Ouch, I just realized he has the chance to run around in circles. I'm afraid you can't catch him :( Ah well, very nice game anyway.

Edited 6/8/2014 20:52:35

yes :'(
It was happened once.. Nice running strategy implemented by AdsRiskbot..

Ads RiskBot broke down in that 100 draw game. For some reason GreenTea didn't go after him but just moved his stacks around.

This running away was well solved by AdsRiskbot. His bot hits territories that the opponent can't threaten next turn and he doesen't run into dead ends. Of course his bot also has to have a basic map understanding to know when a draw is the best he can get. I'm quite glad that AdsRiskbot has won this tournament since he had some funny and good ideas. The only game that he lost against GreenTea was mainly because of a terrible mistake round 4 where he ran into two bad fights.

Edited 6/8/2014 21:12:23

Congrats to AdsRiskbot's maker! Thing was over before I even got on. Didn't know when or exactly how they were going to run it or show the games so I missed it all. Did they show all the games played in real-time or just spit out results like before? They're not very good at putting on a show. At least top few bots got their due.

Doushibag: No, there was a timer between each single game of 8 minutes, regardless of whether it ended earlier. Trust me, the games against Gadzbot were VERY suspenseful for me ;)

Ah, well I'm glad you guys got to watch it in such a manner. I missed out on that.

Well played by Ads.

A replay of the finals with 0% luck would still be an interesting thing though.

congrats to Ads, was somewhat unexpected by me atleast.

How about alongside the 1400 in prize money, the winner also gets the chance to have their bot batttle the official Warlight bot? If any challengers beat the true Warlight bot, they have the posssibility of being intigrated as the new AI system. give the humans a bigger challenge against the AI.

Warlight-AI was thrown in by Fizzer into the competition

there was also some talk from jim and fizzer that the winner of the challenge being turned into a warlight single player challenge for humans to try and beat the bot on those settings.

Hey Greentea, nice job on running away with all the ELO-points :D (they will soon all be his) I'm wondering if you're still just improving your general model or if you made some specific changes for the map?

Hello

Nah, Blender is the most badass bot at present and will probably take number 1 spot.

One mistake however:
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a44cbc4b5ab20b42223fe0
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/53a43eb14b5ab20b42223ee6
--> Blender isn't expanding effectively in Europe. It's better to attack neutrals with one big attack than with two small attacks.

Maybe you / someone else finds a mathematical / algorithmic solution to effectively expand. This solution has to satisfy following constraints / find a good compromise:
1. The expected chance to get the bonus has to be >= the chance to get the bonus with each other expansion plan (using the same amount of deployment)
2. After taking the bonus the leftovers should not be in the middle of nowhere but where they are needed.
3. While taking the bonus also the leftovers have to be in a place where you can use them for the next expansion step (belongs to condition 1).
4. If it's unlikely that it will help you taking the bonus faster you shouldn't split your stack.
5. Sometimes it's better to hit a territory strong which borders the opponent than going for a crazy stack splitting. There are countless times where my bot won in Africa and then lost the game since he tried to take all Africa spots in one turn while the opponent sat in South America. I'd say this is always the case if the opponent bot knows you are in that bonus and also the case if your chance of taking the bonus is low anyways.

Ikalgo, just fix some bugs xD
But you (Blender, right?) will be soon #1 - imba Europe strategy works.
Such staregy should be very easily to code, because it is well splitted on states, with performing best moves in each state:

1 -> Capturing Europe - all is deployed here
Success 1:
2 -> Attack strong to North Africa
Success 2:
3.1 -> Concentrate forces in North Africa, attack if needed, and in same time go to Australia.
go to step 5.
Failure 2:
3.2 ->
If Europe is broken. go to step 4.
If Enemy in North Africa has much less armies then W.Europe + S.Europe go to step 2.
If Armies in W.Europe < Armies S.Europe - deploy all in W.Europe and move from S.Europe to W.Europe. go to step 3.2
If Armies in S.Europe < Armies W.Europe - deploy all in S.Europe and move from W.Europe to S.Europe. go to step 3.2
Failure 1:
4 -> Loss :(
5 -> Win :)

Edited 6/20/2014 18:02:21

Hey,

Yea, ironically it was just fixing one bug (twice) from the version that was competing (which I mentioned a couple of times in the forum during the finals), and removing my SA strategy alltogether.

The perfect expansion of Europe is indeed quite complex. I agree with all your points made and I have considered all of them early on as this was vital to my europe strategy. I wasn't able to solve "graph theory" for it.

I was also considering to just use a game tree which considers all possibilities but I haven't really found out how to do it. The constraint of ending up in the southern regions in the end gave me a headache more than once.

You noticed the suboptimal choices in the "last turns of capturing Europe" but I found them not that problematic most of the time (though, indeed it is suboptimal), as at that late stage of capturing europe, e.g. attacking with 7v2 is only marginally better than 6v2 (and thus the split is not that harmful). Add in the possibility that an enemy is near and it's not that hard to have a suboptimal solution occur.


My heuristics are like the following:

Placement:
Basically I try to aim for each region to have (neutral_troop_count + 2) for all the regions in Europe. This you can also still see in that last turn of capturing Europe where it would be more efficient to place them all on 1 big stack as you point out, but "finishing up" a continent is a bit different than "optimizing chance to capture a continent a.s.a.p. (i.e. expansion within continent)". Indeed, a better algorithm would combine them. I guess I could add "finishable" state or something and then run another algorithm to make a big stack.

Attacking:
- make [neutral, my_region] pairs of neutrals in europe and my regions that can attack them
- sort the pairs by how many of my regions can attack the neutral region (fewer first) and as second condition by the number of European neutral neighbours they have (fewer first)
- make an empty object that will store which of my regions have already attacked
- for each of those pairs, if my region of the pair has not attacked yet, attack the first occurring neutral with (neutral_troop_count + 2), add region to "done" object.

The result is usually a good ordering of attacks

- new loop where I loop over my regions and allow them to attack another region if they have enough troops
- new loop where I loop again over my regions and have them attack the region which has lowest probability of being captured (if they have enough troops).

But yea, I'd like to see someone solving the solution as it for sure is possible to obtain a perfect strategy. It is quite a weird tree with it's dynamic nature (e.g. there are quite a huge amount of states for a game in "round 3" if you consider all the different numbers of troop count with 100% luck divided over a variable amount of regions owned, plus the fact that Europe is asymmetrical giving many different options).

I do believe that this algorithm will be extremely important in the next competition.

Edited 6/20/2014 18:19:27

GreenTea: You basically describe what I did :-). And yea, my main issue was that I was afraid it wouldn't work and therefore I also coded SA strategy, which in my case was not as good as you guys' solution. Btw, it would be nice if your bot would lose some and let me be first for a bit so I'm first in both Poker and Warlight ;D

The thing that made Europe work in the end was choosing a region in SA. That really slows you down. I added this a day before final, but I hadn't anticipated that it would mean my troops would arrive quickly on North Africa, and then either run into your big stack that was used for capturing SA, or my troops would even run away if encountering an uncaptured brazil (none of this happened in my earlier version where I did not choose a dummy region in SA. the issue with a dummy in SA was that Dalek was coming for me from Australia at a high speed. at that time I still tried to capture Brazil rather than just settle for North Africa. The correct order is: north africa->indonesia->brazil->greenland)! I now fixed that simply and it's working great.

I chose the name Ikalgo here as it is the name of an octopus in a show that I like. I see the Europe strategy as an octopus; Europe is the body, it extends his tentacles to NorthAfrica/Brazil, Australia and to North America ;) It has to mainly protect his body, but also the endings of his tentacle haha.

Main struggles:

- Protecting Europe TwoVOne (I now implemented something that tries to counter you guys)
- Expanding in Europe

Edited 6/20/2014 20:49:34

Already looking forward to season 2... random maps should be great fun!

Now you guys can feel my pain. Will it blend, YES!




PS. someone update their bot to pick Europe spots plskthx.

Yea, it's funny that I haven't seen a Europe bot in the whole competition... Kewakareban is the closest to it; he sometimes captured Europe quite fast.

It's a great day for me -- first time in warlight on #1, and at the same time Poker #1 :)

Edited 6/22/2014 11:18:06