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Showing posts from 2020

CodinGame: Building an AI to play (and win) at "Penguins"

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This November, I came back to the US from visiting South Korea, and while I was self quarantining, I decided to get back into solving puzzles on CodinGame . A game called "Penguins" popped up as the weekly challenge, so I decided to give it a shot. I worked on building an AI for a few days, and made decent progress, but then took a break to compete in the Fall Challenge. After the Fall Challenge was over, I decided to come back to the Penguins game and try to get my AI to first place. I finally achieved my goal on December 3rd! I did this using a variation of Monte Carlo Tree Search with a custom evaluation function for scoring the gamestate. Leaderboard (December 2020) KnightMoves, that's me! What is Penguins? Penguins is a game played on a hexagonal grid, and the goal is to move your penguins around the board and eat as many fish as possible. As you move around, the ice breaks, so you have to be careful not to get trapped or stranded. It's based on the boardgame ...