Hog Strategy Contest 2024

Instructions

This contest is completely optional!

Download a blank final_strategy.py file and start coding!

Submit a final_strategy.py file containing a function called final_strategy and a PLAYER_NAME.

$ python ok --submit

The contest ends on 2024-11-01 23:59:00. We will use your latest submission before this date to determine the final results of the contest.

Your strategy should not take more than about 5 minutes to run on a single-threaded machine with about 1GB of RAM. Specifically, the following loop should take no more than about 5 minutes:

for i in range(300):
    for j in range(300):
        final_strategy(i, j)

We won't enforce this strictly, but strategies that take significantly longer to run (hours, days) or require special hardware (e.g. GPUs) to run fast will be disqualified.

注意（详见下方Submission Rules）：

  1. 可以使用的Python库包括标准库、NumPy和SciPy，不可以使用硬件加速。
  2. 你的策略应该是确定性的，是一个纯函数，使用非纯函数可能会导致未知结果。
  3. 如果你想使用Project01中的代码，需要将他们拷贝到提交的文件中。

Leaderboard

The leaderboard can be found here. It will continuously update as the contest progresses.

Contest Rules

Each submitted strategy will play against all other submissions in a set of \( 10^6 \) hog game scenarios. The outcome of this tournament will be determined by strategy alone and not the roll of the dice or flip of a coin. A submission scores a match point each time it wins exactly more than half of all scenarios. Ties count as losses.

We will rank submissions based on the number of matches they won. If two submissions won same number of matches, the one with small code size has a higher rank.

Game Rules

Here are the full set of rules:

  • Pig Out.

    If any of the dice outcomes is a 1, the current player's score for the turn is 1.

  • Picky Piggy.

    A player who chooses to roll zero dice scores \( (2 \times \vert \texttt{tens} - \texttt{ones} \vert + 1) \) points; where tens, ones are the tens and ones digits of the opponent's score. The ones digit refers to the rightmost digit and the tens digit refers to the second-rightmost digit.

  • Swine Swap.

    After points of the turn are added to the current player's score, if the resulting score is a perfect square, then swap the scores of both players. A perfect square is any integer \( n \) where \( n = d \times d \) for some integer \( d \).

Size Penalty

To discourage you from just hard-coding your program output in your submission, we have introduced a size penalty for large submissions. Specifically, your GOAL_SCORE will not simply be 100, but will instead depend on the size of the final_strategy.py file that you submit, according to the following function:

def target_score(program_size_in_bytes):
    scaled_score = program_size_in_bytes / 10000 * 300
    return int(min(max(scaled_score, 50), 300))

Your program size will be displayed on the scoreboard.

Dice for Ranking

The dice we use in the contest should be fair six-sided. "Fair" means that each face of the dice has the same probability of landing face up.

However, a flaw in our ranking code makes the dice unfair. We provide dice0 and dice1 separately for the strategies. The first strategy rolls dice0, and the second strategy rolls dice1. The problem is, that both dice0 and dice1 are test dice of the same outcomes, as the following pseudocode. Can you find the flaw and utilize it to beat your opponent?

outcomes = []
for _ in range(n):
    outcomes.append(random.randint(1, 6))
dice0 = make_test_dice(*outcomes)
dice1 = make_test_dice(*outcomes)

Submission Rules

All strategies must be deterministic, pure functions of the current player scores. Non-deterministic strategies or strategies based on the history of the game will not behave as expected when submitted and will likely not do well.

  • You may use most general-purpose libraries (standard library, NumPy, and SciPy) in your submission. Make sure all your logic is in the final_strategy.py file that you submit.
  • You may import functions from the files provided in the hog_contest folder, but may not modify them. If you want to use any other logic from your hog.py project file, you must copy it into final_strategy.py.

If you have any questions about the rules, don't hesitate to post in QQ group.

Some Tips by TA

（小故事）

在2019年的时候，某位助教参与了中国计算机学会举办的CCF大学生计算机系统与程序设计竞赛。 有一题是设计一个针对不同优先级任务的调度器（也就是操作系统中的scheduler），评测程序会计算你的调度器在不同负载下的综合完成率作为性能指标。 这道题共有16个测试点，每个测试点正确得1分，性能指标最高的选手+5.25分，其余选手按照性能指标与最高的比值进行给分。

如果你们对操作系统有过了解，其实调度器是有很多实现方式的，Linux v2.6引入的完全公平调度器（Completely Fair Scheduler，CFS）大约有2100+行代码。 但是比赛哪有那么多时间呢？ 助教直接交了一个随机（其实随机算法是有名字的，叫做Lottery Scheduling），获得了90分，也就是说大约有最高分的90%性能。

回到我们的Hog Strategy Contest，你辛辛苦苦想出来的代码未必能取得高分，可能一个另辟蹊径或者投机取巧的方法反而能大获全胜。