The accountant validator 23

Contests
#1

Hello !
I’m stuck for a few days now on the validator 23, and it’s really frustrating to not know why your program isn’t working… Even if I understand the need to hide validator to avoid hard coding, how are you suppose to debug without knowing the cause?
I had 2 ideas: enemies blocking me in a corner and dying. So I rewrite all my “avoid vector” method to prevent being cornered… It’s working good on the test but then, it was working before too…
Second idea was being in a level where it’s impossible to save anything, and so my bot didn’t kill any enemies and scored 0. So I implemented something to kill an enemy in this case, but I can’t test it since there is no such case in the test…
I can’t say it was useless to implement these (okay the second one didn’t improve the score at all :p), but the guessing game isn’t paying much… 1k points?

Does someone has others ideas of what could cause a failure in validator 23?
Thanks !

#2

There is indeed a problem with the test case not being representative enough of the validators imho.

To the extent that when you pass 40k you end up doing about constantly the same scores on test cases with different methods but those same methods get several thousand of variation on a submit.

It’s quite hard to tell if you are doing better on the test cases as they seem to max out quite fast.

  • For your problem i would suggest to simulate a few moves and try a few different ways to escape.
    I believe it’s pretty hard to escape every situation without any simulation.

Edit: The test case don’t max all out that fast but the fact that you don’t have a general score when running the test cases makes it harder to have a clue of your overall performance like you get doing a submit.