The Castle Doctrine Forums

Thank you for the compliment, Mr. Andrus.

I was watching some of that in near real time and at first you were just burning through cash while exploring dead ends. Then you got a bit deeper and started scaring the crap out of me. Make yourself at home, but please don't get too cozy. Otherwise I may feel obligated to pay you a visit.

P.S. I'll get you your whole name later. All I remember is Andrus.

Been a couple years since I took AI but I'm going to have to say I disagree. IIRC, minmax and similar algorithms are something you would apply when you can estimate a score/heuristic like how many chess pieces do you still control. There's no analogy in TCD. You've either gotten the safe or not. You might say the heuristic is how close to the safe you've gotten, but the safe could be 2 spaces next to the front door behind a powered door and the solution involves traversing the entire house. Just look at the numbers. 4^2000 is a decimal number with 1200+ digits. Even if you constrained it to ~2 moves per turn (lots of time spent in hallways) and limited the depth to 400 moves, you're still talking about a search space larger than the number of particles in the observable universe. And remember: for each of those possibilities, you have to simulate the whole run through the house. Sure, some of that space will be pruned by illegal moves, but you can't easily say how much.

Take my house as a low bar. 150 moves to solve. Most of it is a hallway, so I'll grant you 2 moves each turn. 2^150 = 1.4^45. So even if you could test each simulation in a nanosecond, you're still talking orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe for the bot to solve my house.

When you say building a bot to build a house is much more difficult, I think you've underestimated the difficulty of a bot to solve a house. In fact, a maze like house is incredibly easy to generate with a bot. That's how roguelikes have been written for 30+ years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexer

That's what my example does. It uses 2 control bits to select from 4 signals. http://castledraft.com/editor/fLeq1E

It's people with tools, people without tools, people with greater than starting bounty. I don't get it.

It's almost makes sense if there's an unpowered trapdoor and maybe you think a clock or magic dance is going to save you.... but a pit!?!?!

Yea... I was thinking that too. Hopefully not jaynes again.

Like a dummy, I meant to record that run but forgot to hit the button. The safe was on the far right center, a straight shot from the front door. The middle was a bunch of powered doors. I think I blasted around maybe one and nothing else was really going on.

edit: YEA. I think we may have another hacker on our hands, maybe the same guy. He just walked back into my house for 2 steps. I figured he had already suicided since I took everything he had, but no... I checked his house and he already has $16k. The chances that he recovered $16k with no tools in the last couple hours are extremely slim. Maybe a dual account doing a re-up, but the way he skyrocketed to the top in the first place plus the wake he copied Price's entry way makes me think hacker.

update: I'm 99% sure if I leave my house I'm a goner. Just left and Wallace is in with $15k tools... we'll see.

update: er.... he died and he didn't seem to know what he was doing. I'm less certain now. Maybe it was just a guy with multiple accounts.

I suppose I should say some words for my acceptance speech. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'd like to thank specifically all the people that helped me get here. But I don't remember their names, so sorry.

I came from nothing, so I know how you all feel. When I was just a boy with nothing but my dog Spot and my 2-bit watch, I dreamed about this day. And now it's finally here.

Let me assure you I'm going to keep all the promises I made during my campaign. Lowering crime against myself. Supporting the fine arts. Getting our economy started again with trickle down economics. Family values. Well, I don't have a family anymore... they were taken from me in three horrific incidents. Anyway, I promise not to take out your children unless I absolutely have to. Now that I've removed General Wallace from power, things around here are going to change. Rest assured that the new king won't be like the old king. At least for today because I'm pretty busy.

I'm Charles Jeffrey Penn and I approve this message.

Ooh, sweet. I always build my clocks at the top and connecting them was a pain.

Hmm... fair point. Though I don't know if I like that whole mechanic of wiping out 2 or 3 pages of houses just to protect yourself. Especially with house easy brute forcing is.

Oh... didn't think that would work.

What if robbers couldn't enter any house that was worth less than their current backpack value unless there was a painting there?

Really, there's nothing to be gained, mechanically speaking, from entering a house where you are going to lose money. A painting is the only exception. This wouldn't prevent all abuse, but would stop starter tool runs from destroying $1k houses and below.

Oh.... if you mean, you only had $800 cash and the rest tools, that's not really meaningful. Consider tools as part of your cash value. For all we know the top house with $320k could be all tools and $0 cash.

Heh. I had a much more inviting house, which looked like this:

It was tricky for a few reasons. Mainly that the first floor is on a clock and taking 2 steps killed you. Kind of funny seeing almost all my tapes having 2 steps. Then the next switch was super-sticky. Then the part on the right is a dead end even though it looks like someone cut their way through to the vault....

My plan was always to upgrade when necessary. Well, it became necessary when someone got through all but the last part on Friday. He even had a ladder to guess the last part (1 out of 4 chance).

So I've definitely shifted from inviting mode to turtle mode. My commitment percentage is actually fine, which is probably due to my house value. My main problem now is I've seen a HUGE decrease in activity in the past couple days. Only seen ~10 visitors all day.