The battle in CodeCombat between 545 programmers is over

On Habré already talked about the wonderful game CodeCombat , which helps to learn Javascript in a boring game form. But in the battle of Greed , it was not the newcomers that encountered, but real professionals.

During the competition, 545 participants wrote over 126,000 lines of code. Each spent an average of 10 hours preparing tasks, which corresponds to 7.5 person-months of development. The calculation of the total took place on the 673-nuclear cluster, which in one hour calculated the result of all 153,439 games. Winners will collect prizes worth more than $ 40,000.

Absolute champion Wizard Duke showed a completely unique result: 363 wins, 0 losses, 14 draws. In an interview with the organizers, 23-year-old English programmer Michael Heasell explained his coin collecting strategy . The player's motion vector was calculated as the sum of the vectors generated by the surrounding coins, depending on their value, and the vectors of the opposite direction from the borders of the playing area and fellow coin collectors. The result of adding all the vectors showed in which direction the collector made the next move.
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Thus, the Wizard Duke collectors moved in the direction of the most dense clusters with valuable coins, evenly distributed over the territory.

In addition, the value of the coin was calculated also taking into account its distance to the nearest enemy, in order to maximize profit.

His unit production strategy is also quite complicated. Michael used an advanced categorization architecture to prioritize between types and subtypes of autonomous bot behavior. For example, one type of behavior is sounding. Some players build a large army in response to the appearance of any aggressor. To check the enemy, Wizard Duke sent a single soldier in the middle of the game to the enemy base.

For a tense battle between the Wizard Duke player and the Canadian clan Bellardia, see here . Interestingly, from the middle of the game session, coin pickers from opposite sides move almost synchronously in pairs, which indicates the similarity of the strategies used by Wizard Duke and Bellardia.