Hog Strategy Contest

• Due: Monday 10/12 @ 11:59pm
• Download: hog_contest.zip

A strategy is
A single function that makes
Ten thousand choices.

Instructions

This contest is completely optional!

Download a blank final_strategy.py file and a test for correct formatting as a zip archive. Run the provided tests:

python3 -m pytest -k validate

Submit your final_strategy.py to Gradescope: run Provenance: Prepare Submission Bundle from the VS Code command palette and upload the zip it creates.

The contest ends on Monday 10/12 at 11:59 PM. 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 8GB 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)

Strategies that take significantly longer to run (such as 10+ minutes) or require special hardware (e.g. GPUs) to run fast will be disqualified.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard can be found here. The course staff will update it every few days as the contest progresses.

Contest rules

Teams can have one or two people. Each person can only be part of one team.

Each submitted strategy will play against all other submissions. The player to go first will be determined by a flip of a fair coin. We will exactly compute the expected win rate for each player, so that 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 has an expected win rate strictly above 50.0001%. We will rank submissions based on the number of matches they won. Ties count as losses.

The top submission gets 2 points of extra credit!

The next nine submissions get 1 point of extra credit.

Don't use AI. This contest, which is just for fun, is about human ingenuity. You may not use language models (ChatGPT, etc.) to generate any code related to this project, either for your final submission or during development. You may not use language models to suggest an approach. Try to come up with a solution yourself.

Of course you can talk to other students and read articles online, but if there is some indication that some top-scoring submissions weren't created entirely by the participants but instead using a language model or by copying code found online, then all extra credit points for the contest will be cancelled. (Please try not to ruin the contest for yourself or others.)

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 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))

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.

Your final_strategy.py cannot depend on any external modules. Use the Python standard library. You are welcome to use external modules during development, but not in your final submission.

It is not possible to know the opponent's goal score.

Happy hogging!