12/8: Class Notes

What did people think of 7 letter word?
Daniel: It was helpful to have previous reports, previous code less helpful
Neha: It was helpful to know the approach of previous years. Knowing what not to do helped to figure out what to do.
EPK: Maybe it would be interesting to repeat multiple projects
Dan: We wasted a lot of time getting an architecture together when we could have been writing the code.
Elba: It was helpful that the first project was text based (and not geometric)
Flavio: It was nice that we could get some basic results quick

Mosquito?
EPK: I liked that it was visual
Daniel: It was interesting that nobody got a good discrete solution
Everyone thought that the competition was fun

Push?
Elba: Everyone kinda plateaued
Yang: It was an interesting game, that models what we see in real life
Neha: The piling was terrible

iSnork?
General consensus - many variables, very complex, quite a bit of room for further work

Most people voted to extend project 4 for next year

12/6 Class Notes

Tournament parameters:

Group 4 will create an extra player that does just danger avoidance, and then comes back to the boat.

D:
30, 40
R:
5, 8, 15
N:
1, 2, 7, 20, 30
Maps:
Lochness
Mines and treasure
G2 benchmark
Lochness, but it's happy, not dangerous
Piranha
Lochness, plus 3 happy creatures of the same species
G5 VERY happy
1 or 2 static happy creatures
Piranha plus a few good creatures
More than 26 species

1 map with very dense wildlife many different species, d=60

We'll narrow this down to 8-10 boards

How many different random seeds?
~100-1000, depending on time it all takes (will maximize # seeds to fit in 4 hr run)

We'll use a different configuration today...
D=40, R=8,N=7, Seed=1,291,659,224,861

G1: 1023
G2: 1591
G3: 1330
G4: 702
G5: 1217
G6: 836
G7: 1153

What did we learn today?
John: Cover the board!
Daniel: We are overly conservative when estimating the number of creatures instantiated
Lauren: We are overly optimistic with the same thing!
Flavio: Better to be home early than to be home late!


Weds: Final code due by noon. Course wrap-up.
Mon: Presentation and report. and peer review

12/1: Class Notes

Schedule update: We are swapping the class wrapup and presentation days. So presentations on the 13th. Course wrapup on the 8th. Final players due at noon on the 8th.

We ran a d30 piranha map:
G5: -887,000; 13 didn't make it home
G1: 35,000
G2: 35,000
Lauren: We stay in the boat until there's no danger in the radius.
Flavio: This is going to keep you locked in the boat!
G3: -21,000
Jesse: We got the max, then we didn't go back, so we lost it all
G4: -1,347,000
Zach: We don't properly avoid danger due to a bug
G6: -71,000; 7 DSQ
You should have a fuzzy condition test to see if you have the max

Mines:
G5: 0
G1: 5740
G2: -156
Whats a good meta strategy to realize that your current strategy needs to be changed?
David: Make milestones, and see if it's taking too long to ge there

Neha: Do path finding through static dangerous creatures

G3: 20740
G4: 1740
Zach: We should be exploring... but retraced our steps for some reason
G6: 1740

Lauren: It's important to have different strategies for static/moving danger.

Lauren: Visiting all of the creatures will be NP-Hard (traveling salesman)
DFed: Just use simple heuristics (see the closest, etc. only need to see 3 of each creature)

G5: 5005
G1: 4785
G2: 5321
G3: 6275
G4: Crash
G6: 5853

11/29 Class Notes

Daniel: If there's something really valuable out there, and getting of the boat may give you some minor penalty, you shouldn't just stay on the boat

We ran on Lochness:

G6 - We have each player explore, left to right, then get stuck on the right. (6000, then -3000 after penalties)
G4: We are using the isnork, but not acting upon it. (3000)
G5: (Neha) - We have some big bugs with handling messages (-71000)
G1: 9000 points. They used the isnork to send messages, but not listen
DFed: Our snorkelers return home after they see everything
Dan: Actually, might be wise to stay out to help spot things
Lauren: But if there's a very high risk of danger, and not much to track, you should go home
G2: (John) - We go home early also. Sending out junk messages for the seaweed, shouldn't be bothering. 11,000 pts
G3: (David) - We use the isnork right, and we do a spiral exploration
G7: We are not using the isnork either. -13,000


G5 Happy trials:
G1: 3050. Mostly random wandering
G2: 3850.
G3: 4300
G4: 2645
G5: -(a lot). Still stuck in random pairs
G6: Still stuck on the right. -9150
G7: 3065

What have we learned?

John: There's a really steep penalty for not making it back on the time. Should we raise it?

We're changing it completely so that if you don't make it back to the boat, your entire score is DSQ'ed

Dan: Is there a "par" for each map?
Yes... 3 of every creature happiness

Eva: We are using huffman coding
Blake: We are sending this as numbers in base 26. 4 or fewer creatures fit in 2 chars, more fit in 3
DFed: You don't need to send the position if you know that the player is always following

EPK: How many divers you have is a very important variable when determining what to follow
Flavio: You need to follow at a distance to make sure you don't get hurt

Nitin: It can be really difficult to handle very dangerous creatures.
John: We should focus on board coverage
Daniel:

For Weds:
Send AND receive messages (and act on them ;))
Everyone gets back to the boat
Feel free to come up with t-shirt ideas. For $8 shirts, we will need to use only 1 color. Full color gets much more expensive (towards $20) and the quality goes down (you end up with iron-on transfers instead of silk-screening)

11/28

DFed will augment the simulator so that snorkelers will see the direction that observed things are facing.

G1 & 4 errored.

G5 had a bad danger avoidance code
g6 had some big bugs too

What have we observed so far?
PK: Avoid the danger
Nitin: Is there some complexity in avoiding dangerous creatures?
EPK: The best way to avoid a creature is to swim perpendicular to it (Blake's idea)

Can you compute an expected score?
Is it worthwhile to do a complete simulation on each turn?
Daniel: You could do this probabalistically
Should we jump in the water for short periods of time and come back, ever?
Daniel: Note that if there are a lot of static creatures, it's essentially a maze solving problem

Blake: Players might want to keep track of a map (particularly of static) creatures to help them return

Eva: We need to have some way of interrupting a full message to deliver something super important
Neerja: You could just follow what's so important for 1-2 moves while sending what you were already, and then send the important one
DFed: We have no problem fitting everything that we need in 3 chars.
Blake: We encode different things depending on how big R is
Jesse: If there are a lot of things, it's not useful to broadcast this

DFed: We're sending (species)(location)(etc)
Daniel: This is good because then you know what you are looking for, and it can be interrupted better.
DFed: Even if you send stale messages, we can infer when it was sent and from where
Arcahna: Snorkelers should permute themselves around the board to see different things

Daniel: The isnork is really only useful for things that are rare and/or high value

For monday:
Make it better. G1 and g4 certainly shouldn't crash again :)
Have thoughts about the iSnork vocabulary

11/22: Class Notes

G2 submitted a fairly sparse board, benchmark, which has a few high scoring items
Daniel: This is interesting because it forces you to have to spread out
Lauren: Boards with few creatures are "easy" in that you have less creatures to find to maximize your score.

We computed that the maximum ideal dimension is 80, after which point you'll get stuck at the edges
Blake: Bigger R's shrink the board
Daniel: R=D is a sanity check
Lauren: Why not use 2 way communication with the isnork?
DFed: How do you do that without interference? Maybe you have some sync time where everyone agrees to give some sort of state update.
Daniel: We don't need to have people tell us what they need if they are instead telling us what they have seen
Flavio: But we may need to know the ID of the creature too, not just what it is
John: In a dangerous environment, a conga line makes sure that you know a safe path back to the boat
What happens if your conga line is interrupted?

Did we miss discussing anything?
John: Whether creatures are helpful or just provide a minimal benefit

We'll make a map with 5-10 of each creature, filling at least half of the cells (all benign, same happiness)

Zach: Use something like huffman coding to make important messages come out faster, and less important ones take longer

What features would we want to encode in the isnork?
John: Add a 27th letter, the null character
DFed: We need to know the radius at which you saw something

For Weds:
Some players that respond to the boards we saw today.
Be ready to talk about how you are going to use the isnork.

11/17: Class Notes

Today we are starting project 4. Hooray!

Group assignments:
Group 1: DFed, Daniel & Flavio
Group 2: Lauren, Nitin & John
Group 3: Jesse, David & Eva
Group 4: Zach, Blake & Elba
Group 5: Yang, Neha & Archana
Group 6: Pilunchana, Neerja & Neetha
Group 7: Andrew, Dan & Elizabeth

DFed: We should use a 2 character message instead of a 1 character message
Lauren: If you have a buddy, then you can have 2 people sending out messages from the same observation.
DFed: Would it be smart for all of the snorkelers to go in the same direction?
Zach: It's high risk
Neha: We should be sophisticated with our coding to show the different kinds of sealife
Eva: We should come up with a good way to do path finding?
Daniel: Each player should have a long term goal of where they want to explore
Archana: We can pre-determine different roles for each snorkeler
Should one stand still?
Lauren: It may be more useful to hang out in the middle than get stuck in a corner
Zach: Depends on how many players you have.
DFed: Fanning out in all different directions isn't great because when you actually want to backtrack to see what someone else said, you have to go all the way over there

For Monday:
An interesting configuration for an ocean.
An initial player attempt.

11/10: Class Notes

Lauren: As piles get condensed, we become somewhat more eratic.
Daniel: Once there are no more single moves that can help you, it's really hard to tell who remains your partner
Lauren: You also have to make sure that if a player has only one move left, you don't hold it against them if they hurt you (or don't help) (or help)
Daniel: Many groups don't seem to have an endgame strategy implemented yet

Flavio: Making agreements at the start of the game does not seem appropriate because it's impossible to guarantee that it will be upheld.
Dan: The last move should always be to sabotage someone
John: When should you start sabotaging? Last, second to last?
Neerja: Interpreting moves at a statistics level misses a lot of nuance
Elba: It's really hard to interpret what a move means, so relying upon stats on that is not so great

What issues are still open?
EPK: If you are going to get 0 points, and your only possible move will help someone, maybe you should make an invalid move
We had a significant discussion over whether this is appropriate or not
In the interest of stability, we're not going to change anything. I'll try to get some extra helpful logging for when invalid moves do happen though

Dan: There is a cost of aggression: you're missing out on cooperation!
David: Sometimes it's better to be 2nd best near the end because people will go after the best.

Predictions for the tournament:
Eva: Some good cooperation
John: A lot of variance

Reminder: Players due by noon on Friday
Presentations and reports Monday

Expected tournament run times

Based off of a few anecdotal tests with only 1 core running, without overhead of logging the results:

# of rounds	expected run time (sec)
10	.35
25	.8
50	1.5
100	3

There will be:
8 choose 6 (28) configurations with 1 of each player (counting dumb player)
8 with 6 of each player (1 player playing against itself)
8 choose 2 (28) configurations with 3 of each player (2 players playing 3v3)

That's 62 player combinations and we had 7 round configurations, and assuming we do 1000 runs of each pair of player-round configurations, that's 434,000 executions.

I can conservatively run this across 300 cores, which puts us at 1445 executions per core, and if we round out the average run time to a highly conservative 2 seconds (counting overhead for logging and distributing batches), it should take just over 50 minutes to run the entire tournament.

11/8: Class Notes

We need to set the final code delivery date:
Friday by 12:00 PM

Tournament parameters?


DFed's group isn't observing betrayals and continues to help players that have helped it, ever.

What did we learn from today's simulation?
Co-operating with a player is a good idea, but you need to have a backup strategy
Andrew: Use a short term memory
Archana: When co-operating with a player, don't do the "best" thing, so that you can do something else bette rlater.
Blake: But our player would then ignore you because you're not really helping us as much as someone else who is helping us more

Perhaps we should vary the number of rounds in the tournament?

Run 1,000 runs for each tournament
We will do 8 combinations of players for each configuration of # of rounds [counting dumbplayer] (also, run so that we have 8 more tournaments, each with 6 of one player, also do a set of 3v3's with only 2 players).

10, 25, 26, 50, 51, 99, 100 number of rounds

I'll do a feasibility study before Weds to see how many we can run (I'm expecting to be able to do the above but scale up to 10,000 runs each instead of 1,000).

How much harder is it to form a 3 way partnership over a 2 way?
Zack: Are betrayals a good thing? (for the betrayer)

11/3: Class Notes

We ran G1,2,3,4,5,7 on a 100 round sim:

G4 strangely pushed directly away from itself
G7 is trying to co-operate with the player directly opposite from it, for the first 10 minutes

Is it possible to try to cooperate with everyone?
Jesse: This might appear to be non-cooperation for some
Elba: A tit-for-tat strategy will always help (if everyone is)

Can you help two players at the same time?
John: Yes, but it's very small.
Neha: We should try to only give small helping moves first, and then we can move to more later once we're sure that we're cooperating

Flavio: At the end of the game, co-operation can also include a "defense" strategy

When do we degrade how much we are valuing our cooperation 
Nitin: At first it might look like someone is helping you, but they may be actually just pushing through you to make it to another player
 Zack: Don't just keep a history of the past 10 turns, keep a weighted history of everything - both how much X has helped you ,but also how much you have helped X.
Daniel: It's important to keep track of *if* someone can be helping you, because if they aren't helping, and they can't, you shouldn't hold it against them.

What would make a neutral move?

Should we co-operate with immediate neighbors?
Eva: No, because there are fewer number of moves to make to help

Daniel: Opposite players will end up at end-game doing a defensive strategy for each other.
EPK: Breaking an alliance at the end of the game may be risky because it may alienate them
David: If two players team up against 1, that 1 would need to have 2 people protecting it, otherwise it will lose coins

Neha: The game has something of a bias towards randomness because as the game ends you will HAVE to push piles together

For next Monday:
Improve, improve, improve your players (nooo illegal moves)
Encourage: swap your players

10/27/2010 Class Notes

Last class we talked a lot about collaboration. There are a few basic solutions that we came up with - tit for tat, etc.

G7 came up with the name "PushyPushelkins"

Did we do what we were trying to?
G2: Tried to co-operate with opposite player
G3: Tried to co-operate with the player across diagonally from us

Should you try to co-operate early or later?
Daniel: You could have information if you wait, because you'll see how others are working together.
John: Waiting lets you see who has more coins, and who will be a better ally.
Daniel: When you have multiple clusters you will have more opportunity for collaboration.

Will we end up with many clusters or few clusters?
Dfed: Nobody wants to 0 out everyone's scores in the long term

Dan: It's possible that you get stuck where you have to create a big stack. Maybe you want to make sure that you're helping the ones who won't overtake you anyway.
Neha: There's a risk of trying to help someone who doesn't retaliate.
Blake: That's why you should wait to cooperate

What happens when we add a dumb player?
David: The smart players can take advantage of a dumb player, knowing that they'll never hurt you back

What if it's all dumb, and one intelligent?

What if we have short games?
Andrew: Focus on the center low value squares.
Dan: There will be in general an early/mid/late game strategy, and this will just launch you straight to end-game

For Weds:
Your player must always make legal moves. It should implement some aspect of the strategies that we talked about.

Class notes: 10/20/10

What are the main points for the game?

Jesse: Cooperation: You need to find a cooperative agreement with another player. Not sure how you would signal this cooperation though.
Jesse: This is kinda an iterative prisoner's dilema. A "tit for tat" strategy may be effective, where you do onto others what they do onto you.
Neha: What happens if we end up with just 3 pairs, where opposite players co-operate?
DFed: You want to make sure that not only your opposite player, but also everyone who can affect you is working with you.
Daniel: You definitely want to cooperate with as many people as possible. But you can only make one move at a time, so how can you make people favor you over the long term?
EPK: If you cooperate with your neighbors, you can move directly into somewhere with higher payoff.

Lauren: If Red and Yellow are co-operating, you are working against orange
Neetha: Maybe there is an advantage to letting other people pile up the coins, then move that one pile
Zach: The best alliance to make early doesn't make any enemies - just push a player's coins deeper into their territory
Blake: Make sure that when a medium sized pile is accumulating, make sure that they slowly drift towards you

KAR: There's another issue: You have discussed varying your behavior over score. Is it score within an individual game, or over many games?
Flavio: This is important because we can build a macro/micro strategy

Daniel: If we end up with a few big alliances, we may end up with a bad, but stable case where all of the coins are together and nto helping anyone
DFed: Getting a 3-way alliance will take a lot of time to get everyoen to agree to it

Team formations:
1: Elba, Lauren, Zach
2: John, Dan, Neha
3: Pilunchana, Archana, DFed
4: Flavio, David, Blake
5: Jesse, Daniel, Neetha
6: Eva, Nitin, Elba
7: Andrew, Yang Jian, Neerja

Deliverables:
Monday - Presentations!
Wednesday - A play from each group that does something towards a strategy

Class notes: 10/18/10

Reminder: Final submission - Weds at noon!

What's a good intermediate number of lights?
Lauren: 5 is pretty good, it's an average case
Daniel: You can easily cover 50% of the map with 5 lights

We did some runs with G5.H map
G1: 270
Daniel: We find the spot with the most area and place the lights iteratively
Zach: We can construct linear and branching chains. We build the lights in a graph, then find the one that has the lowest average distance to all of the other lights, and put the collector there. We have a formula that calculates how long the pulses will be by looking at the "depth" from the
G5: 2013
Nitin: We don't do so great with the shadows
G2: 649
Jesse: G1 put the lights right on the perimeter of each other, whereas we make them somewhat closer
John: We create a 2D array and assign an "openness" value to each point

Nitin: We are all using a different approximation, and it seems like the people that take a finer granularity do better.
G3: 3972
Elba: Even if your chaining is slow, it's wayyyy better than random drift
G7: 3950
Dfed: We We have a "dumb" approach where we do a lot of random tries, then do whatever works best
Zach: Depending on how we place the lights, we can scale linearly
Andrew: The chain computation doesn't blow up, but the time to run the actual simulation takes time

G4: 850
G6: Didn't terminate
Yang Jian: We should have been chaining

Tournament configurations?
How many lights should we expect?
3, 10 came out of a hat. What is reasonable?
What about if you had a maze?

Upper bound: 50/100

How many times do we need to run to reduce variance?
Lauren - 5
We will rewrite the simulator so that it will run multiple runs with the same light configuration. I'll pick a reasonable number of runs (on the order of 10, probably)

How many lights?
3, 5, 8, 13, 100

What's an OK upper bound for a max rounds? 15,000

Blank
Boxes & Lines
Cage
Caged
G5 H
Steps
W

We will come up with:
1 maze
2 more hidden ones

10/13: Class Notes

Deliverable today was an automated player. How did we do?

We ran on "Cage.xml" map:
Daniel: Group 1 put all of the lights clustered together in one spot. They found the biggest area and stuck all of their lights there.
G1: 6763
EPK: Group 2 also looked for a large open area to place the collector in, then use a spirograph strategy to place the rest of the lights. They will be chained inwards, but will not necessarily note locations of walls.
G2: 3473
Neetha: We had a lot of bugs, not 100% sure what happened.
G3: 10278
Flavio: We find the largest area, then move diagonally and then horizontally
G4: 1570
David (G5): We look at 10x10 grid units, so we don't necessarily see the obstacles. A local search isn't necessary, need something more global
G5: Doesn't seem like it would ever finish.
Pilunchana (G6): We had special cases, couldn't get one to work here, so we went randomly, but did very poorly.
G6: No termination
DFed (G7): Collector in most open area. Then place lights to have minimal shadow
G7: 799

Why are we limiting how many lights we use? (ex, only using 7 when we have 10)
John: We should add more branches, so that we don't increase timing difficulties but have more lights
Dan: Have extra auxilary chains that aren't directly working with the main chain, but are working as an extra funnel
Neerja: It's really hard to make the frequency work right
Eva: We can take advantage of the walls to break up our sets of lights so that we don't have interacting flows.

We did a central collector manually and collected almost 50% in 261 steps.
Is this strategy optimal?
Dfed: We haven't proven that there isn't a better way to do it on the side
Neerja: There is no particular advantage in where you put the collector (center or side), because it matters mostly where the obstacles are
Eva: Create a partitioned space, closing the gaps between walls with the shortest line. Then find the largest blob, then see how large the rest of the blobs are, then use that to inform your strategy
Daniel: Calculate the minimum distance that each mosquito would have to travel to get to the collector, then use that information
Nitin: If we could look at this as a graph, we could re-use a lot of network flow algorithms that already exist
Blake: You don't need a complete graph representation, just within the boundaries that you need

What's a good fallback strategy?
John: Just put one long chain
Archana: Putting lights in the corner is a good one
Neetha: Putting the lights near the corner is not good because you lose a lot of the light
Archana: We'd use the corners to build a chain inwards
Neerja: You should NEVER pick a position statically

Monday is our final discussion class. Code will be due Weds and we'll start project 3 then too, and have reports and presentations on the 25th

For Monday: Have a very, very robust player.

10/11: Class Notes

We ran the simulator on the 3 light blank map. Most layers
G6: 297
G5: 296
G4: 528
G3: 322
G2: 337
G1: 368
G7: 292

What did we learn from this exercise?
David: When we have limited lights, make sure to cover the area as much as possible, with slower cycles
Nitin: The diagonals are longer than the side, so it makes more sense to put the lights along a diagonal
Neerja: We don't really have enough evidence here to make a lot of conclusions
Andrew: How do we approach timing? We need to make sure that they get all the way across a flow before we turn off the lights. We determined 11.5 was an appropriate timing
Neha: It's most efficient to leave the lights on longer (we looked at 20-30 seconds)
Jesse: Our ideal timing was 30 seconds for a cycle - 18 on, 12 off
Daniel: We used 20/20, but it will be different for different maps and placements

KR: How will you determine these parameters?
Zach: I think it will be constant between maps
EPK: It varies by how much overlap there is between lights

We did the same with 10 lights:
G1: 50
G2: 53
G3: 140
G4: 130
G5: 54
G6: 65
G7: 84

What did we learn from 10 lights, no barriers?
Pilunchana: Only cover 50% of the space, don't worry about getting more.
Daniel: Only invest a light to do a rapid collection if you have a lot of lights
John: Get more than 50% of the mosquitos to the collector as quickly as possible, it's better to have 50.2% than 49.8%


With g2board2, 10 lights:
G1: 181
G2: 141
G3: 963
G4: 899
G6: 125
G7: 132


Deliverable for Weds:
Let's see automatic players. We'll challenge it with one from the collection that we haven't played a lot yet.

Class notes: 10/6/10

KR: Is there something about this project, or any other that makes it inherently NP?

The cross map was interesting. Where do you place the lights? What if you only had 1 light?
Dfed: Use 1 light to draw mosquitoes into 1 region, then put the collector in that region

Dan: If you put a collector at the very end of a line, then you may see it more likely that a mosquito will hit it directly.

Elba: It's very important to make sure that we are using as much of the light as possible (minimal shadow, maximal shine in bounds)

KR: Take the group2board2 map, and think about it with 3 and 10 lights. Manually, come up with the best 3 light and 10 light arrangements.

How can you prune the search space?
Eva: Find only the interesting parts.
EPK: How do you determine how much of the board is empty space? Could you just use a random walk?

KR: What kind of representation do you use?
Blake: Create "areas" as units of reasoning
Jesse: Close off the small gaps, then use that to define the areas
Zach: You couldn't just go end-to-end, you have to do line-to-line
Dfed: We store for each meter of granularity, what lines are closest and how far
David: You can observe the intended direction of flow through a channel, by looking at which directions the obstacles are

KR: In a map with no walls, what's the most efficient way to collect the mosquitoes

Deliverables:
No more maps. A few manual deliverables:
A 3 and 10 light version of an empty map, and a 3 and 10 light version of the group2board2.
Next week, come up with improved players that do something interesting and is informed by your thinking from the manual investigations.

Class Notes: 9/29/10

Ideas for strategies?

Elba: Put 2 lights overlapping with the collector between them to guide the mosquitoes
David: When we have sub-areas, put the collector right near the gap to bring them to it
Yang Jian: Put lines along each obstacle
Neerja: Also need to focus heavily on the light frequency, not just the placement
Dan: Once you get the mosquitos in one area, it's easy to move them as a bunch, rather than moving them individually. The obstacles can be used to keep them in the bunch
Andrew: What if you have lights near each other and flick them really really fast, so that they go to some average location instead of to the light directly
Eva: As we have more and more lights, create an abstraction of light groups
Pilunchana: What if you had only one light?
Neetha: Place the lights in places that are less obscured by obstacles
Neerja: A lot of how long things take to run depends on the initial placement of the mosquitos
Archana: Place the lights in a zig-zag pattern to maximize the board coverage
Pilunchana: When there are a lot of obstacles, a zig-zag may be very useful
Neha: This doesn't work when you have very few lights
Nitin: Never put the collector out of the way
Elba: When you do the zig zag, they should overlap 100%


Deliverables for Weds:
1 - Come up with at least 1, preferable 2 boards per group, and a target number of lights for that board
2 - A player, which doesn't have to do anything super useful. Modify dumb player somehow interesting

Teams for Project 2:

Dan Iter	1
Zach Sheppard	1
Daniel Wilkey	1
John Graham	2
Jesse Bentert	2
Elizabeth Kierstead	2
Lauren Pully	3
Neetha Sebastian	3
Eva Sitaridi	3
Archana Balakrishnan	4
Neerja Pancholi	4
Flavio Palandri Antonelli	4
Dawei Shi	5
Neha Srivastava	5
Nitin Natarajan	5
Elba Garza	6
Andrew Shu	6
Pilunchana Kiatruangkrai	6
Blake Arnold	7
Yang Jian	7
Dan Federman	7

(Is there a bug causing the mosquitos to not fly straight? Can we add more contrast to the simulator?)

Project 2: Mosquito Simulator available

Simulator on CourseWorks (or GoogleCode). Instructions in GoogleCode

Class notes: 9/27/10

Tournament format:
Warning: If your player errors out during the tournament, it will be removed from the rest of the tournament

Do we include old players?
Neha: Include just G1
KR: Let's have 2 classes of tournaments - one with just new players, one with both
Daniel: Some have bugs
KR: OK, so we will use G1 as a representative of last year's players
KR: Note that we are optimizing for high score, rather than ranking

KR: Any ideas for a new tournament, not one that we did last year?
Nitin: Bring in more of LessStingyPlayer
DFed: Using LessStringyPlayer will hurt conservative players
KR: Is it interesting to run with 7 hidden letters?
Elba: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. People still get 1 letter. There is still some play
Nitin: With 7 hidden letters, LessStingPlayer should be there.
Yang Jian: 7 hidden letters means that we depend a lot more on luck
Eva: With 7 hidden letters, we should have more rounds
Daniel: Yes, we could do this and it wouldn't really take that long either
Neerja: Leave out group 1 when you start with 7 hidden letters
KR: But it actually shows an interesting baseline of what happens when you just use your 7 starting letters

Final format:
Number of rounds fix to 100
Vary number of letters 0-7 (for 7 hidden letters do 200)
We will include last year's Group 1 as a player in addition to this year's 7:
8 choose 2 2-player tournaments
8 player tournament
8 player tournament, with 2 of 4 players, done enough so that everyone plays as a duplicate player once
single player tournament, with 4, 8, and 12 of each player
8 choose 2 2-player tournaments, with 5 of each player, plus a "LessStingyPlayer" who always bids rand(0,3)

If we have time afterwords, run 8 players + LessStingyPlayer

Last year:
Vary number of letters 0-6
Vary number of players 2-14
Number of rounds fix to 50

5 choose 2 2-player tournaments
5 player tournament
5 player tournament, with 2 of each player
single player tournament, with 5, 10, and 15 of each player
5 choose 2 2-player tournaments, with 5 of each player, plus a "StingyPlayer" who always bids 0

I will make the results available only as a SQL database - no more text output. I'll send out a SQLite database, probably (might make a public MySQL instead)


We did a run with 7 letters...
What went well/wrong?
Daniel: We are bidding high on letters when we are close
Lauren: We didn't do so great - we were too conservative, which is a big problem on 7 hidden letters. When we get 7 letters for free, we should make sure that we're not that conservative

KR: What makes a successful player?
EPK: It's important to adjust your bidding range based on what everyone else is doing
Monica: It should, however, be largely based upon how you value the letters.
Elba: You need to STILL value the letters carefully on a low/medium/high range, but you must define what low/medium/high is from the market
Neha: Never bid on anything that doesn't help you (ie, don't try to bid to hurt people)

KR: How many of your players will really try to harm opponents in a small game?
(4-5 people raised their hands)

Blake: Being able to adapt to the game will be important.
Yang Jian: Same - having multiple strategies

KR: How many of you have multiple strategies that you switch between?
(about half)
Zach: Our player has 3 strategies, which it switches based upon how many letters we have. We switched based upon an early/middle/late game strategy
Dfed: We are focusing on getting one main strategy to work, otherwise things become much too complex
Neerja: Concentrate on the main strategy. Work on fine tuning various parameters
KR: Yes, for sure - work hard on figuring out how to set each parameter
David: Budget control in 2 player game - make sure that you always have points to rebound as necessary
Daniel: The bonus is very disproportionate, (jumping from 11-12 points to 60+), so it's sooo important to make sure you get a 7 letter word. Spending 30 points for a 6 letter is not OK, but 50 points for 7 letters is good. It's really, really hard to figure out all of the specific corner cases and account for them.

KR: What did you use from last year?
EPK: A priori algorithm
KR: Did anyone rely on last year's strategies, with or without using the code?
Zach: The early/middle/late idea
KR: How essential was it to use last year's players for background?
Eva: We were able to bootrstrap our own discussions
Dan: We already knew a lot of the issues
Zach: It was helpful to be able to play against last year's players as we were developing
Archana: I was in some ways constrained to thinking in previous ways
Dan: It was interesting to read from past group's mistakes