AI Contest - Minesweeper

[Darryl]

I'm assuming the blinds will go up after a certain number of hands? If so, then knowing the entire blind structure and the number of hands until the next increase will be useful.

There is a variable that holds the rounds per blind increase. I wasn't going to expose it per se but was going to just tell everyone the value in the rules but I think I will add it for the ai to use directly.

Typically blinds double every round

Hmm, every round seems a bit excessive and to be honest, I've not seen too many(any?) that follow that rate. These figures aren't final, but I was planning on the large blind/bet minimun being $100 with each player starting with $10,000. 10 players per game. Doubling every round would create a game with roughly 6 rounds. Hardly enough to test the capability of any ai. I actually would prefer a more drawn out game and have set the doubling at every 10 rounds to allow for more conservative play.

[PJYelton]

I agree, long drawn out is MUCH better. Tournaments that I've been a part of that increase the blinds quickly turn into a luck-fest with everyone just going all in any time they have anything. Plus, it's not like time is an issue with nothing but AI's

I'm also assuming we will be playing multiple tournaments to determine the overall winner, will our AI's be recreated with each new tournament? It would be nice to remember things we've "learned" about the other AI's from tourney to tourney without having to start from scratch every time.

[Sang-drax]

It would be nice to remember things we've "learned" about the other AI's from tourney to tourney without having to start from scratch every time.

Yeah, let the AIs create files on the hard drive, or at least allow them to allocate static variables.

[Darryl]

You guys sure do think optimistically... I doubt we have more than 10 entries, but it would be nice. My preferred method for letting you keep information would be to create a global instance of your class( or at a higher scope than the tourney), and just have a virtual reset member fuction to let you know when a new tourney is beginning. That way you can store what you want, memory withstanding and programmatically it would actually be easier that way than having to deal with file i/o.

If we do get over 10, then I would probably do groups of 8