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Today we reached 10,000 games played! Here's the breakdown:
Connect6: 1515
Pente: 1193
Keryo-Pente: 497
Phutball: 149
Othello: 5103
Kalah: 156
Oware: 176
Footsteps: 1211
As you can see, despite being released only a few days ago, Footsteps has had a major impact. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the games are, oh, so very short!
By the way, for those of you not keeping track at home, the games aren't listed, above, in order of release. The release order was Connect6 and Othello, then Pente, then Kalah, then Keryo-Pente and Oware, then, just last week, Phutball, followed shortly by Footsteps.
Footsteps Bots
You've all been very good at discovering how to handily defeat bots in Footsteps. So, today, I've pushed out updated bidding strategies. SiriusBot is unchanged, but the other two should provide, I hope, slightly more challenge.
That said, the bots on this site are at a big disadvantage. To play the game well, they should really build a statistical model of every opponent they play. While there's definitely an optimal bidding strategy in some specific situations, most of the time, the best strategy is to anticipate your opponent's bid. Your strategy can obviously be much more effective if you know that, for example, when I'm about to win there's an 85% chance that I bid only 1 point.
To build statistical models like that, though, you need access to a lot of data about your opponent. Our bots, at this time, are stateless. They don't remember anything from game to game, and there's just not enough bidding history in a single game of Footsteps to build a reliable model. In the future, I'd like to make all the bots persistent, but I hadn't planned on that happening for a while yet, so we'll see.
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stonemender says,