The meandering ways of Sir Bedevere the Wise

Now I have uploaded the first submission to the duel server. It uses a really simple strategy and has no optimizations whatsoever. It will probably get crushed, but it is still an important milestone.

I have implemented a few useful components today, but I still haven’t got anything that I can submit to the duel server. Hopefully, it is not that far away, though. I have thought a lot about strategies, but I don’t really know what kind of approach that might be successful.

The implementation of the card set was almost finished yesterday. I think I need some test cases before continuing. Maybe I can do that before breakfast.

The contest has been running for 16 hours, but I got back from work only a couple of hours ago. I have been reading the task description and trying to understand the problem. Now it’s time to start to write some code.

Now that the contest is over, we’ve made our bitbucket repo public:

http://bitbucket.org/rogueops/icfp2010

The official contest blog now states this:

The circuit design, and the ternary coding, were really there just for
the fun of obfuscation.

Yeah. The kind of fun that caused us to give up after spending a day trying to understand how to get the prefix, after having successfully reverse engineered the gate logic and the server’s input string in a couple of hours.

This has been a day of almost no progress. We are no nearer to understanding how to approach transformation from an input sequence to an output sequence. We’re running a brute force attempt at the moment, but it doesn’t seem very promising.

We thought it would be good to be able to visualize the circuits, so I added dot-file generation from the circuit specification. Looks nice, but I’ve got to get the ordering right..