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K.I.S.S.

Wondev Woman AI challenge was held from June 25th to July 3rd on Codingame, final rank 180 / 2300.

First time I really managed to Keep It Simple Stupid! I initially thought that I would have plenty of time for this challenge. I was being naive.

Out of Wood 3 league

Read actions, pick one at random.

Out of Wood 2 league

Pick action that brings a unit uphill, score points if possible.

Out of Wood 1 league

Trickier and messier, for each units (my units only) compute a score:

• -2 for each blocked neighboring cell
• +5/+2 for each neighboring cell with height == 3/2
• -100 if unit is blocked
• -2/+10 if going down/up
• +100 for a point

Later I added a bonus for pushing an enemy downhill.

Bronze to Gold league

After many tries I ended up with a simple evaluation function. For each unit (including visible enemy units (with a -1 factor):

• +2 for a point scored
• count accessible cells with a decreasing factor: distance == 1 -> +1, distance == 2 -> +1/2…
• unit height x 3

No trees, no function to detect where the enemy might be.

K.I.S.S. drawbacks

Making a simple and efficient AI is awesome, it seems cool and elegant but… I couldn’t go beyond it. Minimax attempts timed out, probably because my actions generator was too simple and time consuming.

Some links

• From Bob (codingame active member): Be Lazy and Keep It Simple
• Voronoi diagrams: tech.io/voronoi