Ocean of Code - Feedback & Strategies

Evening 1, 1h22m50s: hey, cool topic. Oh, I have to actually implement tracking and torpedoes to get out of the first wood league, with my PC melting down for uncorrelated reasons? Sign me in!

Evening 2, 2h57m50s: reach Wood-1 by completing:

  • basic tracking: starting from full map, maintain set of possible opponent positions.
  • torpedoing: shoot any any cell that has a >0 chance of having an opponent. By “any” I mean furthest reachable (intent: deal more damage than I take). More on that later.
  • movement: nearest unvisited cell, priority to N/S, then W/E. A left-leaning sub.

Evening 3, 2h54m55s: reach Bronze by implementing:

  • SILENCE 0 S whenever I’ve got enough power for it. I power it whenever my torpedo is fully charged yet I don’t know where to shoot.

Evenings 4 (1h40m47s) and 5 (1h31m35s): Make code clean. Eliminate a few “how on earth could it have worked before?” kind of mistakes.

Evening 6, 2h15m37s: end up mid-Silver by:

  • moving with the depth-1 tron heuristic
  • restrict torpedoing to when opponent cover is less than 20 cells and shot won’t harm me. If you followed correctly with the previous heuristic, you’ll notice I could (and would!) torpedo myself a lot before that.

One of those evenings happens to be on the same day as another’s: IIRC I split the stream when I passed a league once.

This sums up nicely to 12h53m34s worth of coding.

Tagging @leojean890 for the next PM.

Thanks a lot @eulerscheZahl and @Illedan for the last-minute work on this!

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