April 03, 2007
I've qualified for Online Round 3 of the 2007 TopCoder Open Marathon Match Competition! Take a look at the standings here. I dropped from my provisional rank of 85 to my final rank of 105 (the top 200 qualify). Still, not bad!
After coasting into Round 2, I found myself hard-pressed to survive the cut this time. The objective of this Marathon Match (see problem statement) was to create a player AI for a poker-like game; the rules are similar to five-card draw except that there's only two cards, the card values are only from 0 to 4, and there's an infinite number of each value in the "deck".
I made submission after submission, fine-tuning my algorithm to improve my score. At some point, I found the key to getting a good score: fold when your hand sucks... which is what you're supposed to do in real poker anyway. Being a poker player really helped!
My next objective is to make it to Round 4 (duh!) and to get a yellow rating (currently at blue). The competition will be much tougher next time and the race to get into the top 50 will be very tight.
After coasting into Round 2, I found myself hard-pressed to survive the cut this time. The objective of this Marathon Match (see problem statement) was to create a player AI for a poker-like game; the rules are similar to five-card draw except that there's only two cards, the card values are only from 0 to 4, and there's an infinite number of each value in the "deck".
I made submission after submission, fine-tuning my algorithm to improve my score. At some point, I found the key to getting a good score: fold when your hand sucks... which is what you're supposed to do in real poker anyway. Being a poker player really helped!
My next objective is to make it to Round 4 (duh!) and to get a yellow rating (currently at blue). The competition will be much tougher next time and the race to get into the top 50 will be very tight.
Labels: :D, contests, programming, TopCoder
good luck! ^_^
interesting