This problem is a social engineering problem by construction. The game won’t go to the bot with the cleverest code, it will go to the bot that best guesses the composition of the playing field.
True. I just think things are more interesting if you let that composition grow out of everyone’s isolated ideas instead of gardening it ahead of time. Bearing your judge quote in mind, I should have said something earlier.
Argh, this comment is irritating… even beyond the subtle mistakes (for example, “it’s essential that outsiders don’t figure out what rank of MimicBot you’re running”… if you use even a non-obfuscated simple counter, you’re pretty safe, because they’ll see it as n on their turn and n-1 on your turn, and their response to this number is the same in either case).
While I do somewhat like the fact that my MimicBot now is marginally less likely to be exploited by a predetermined-specific-n exploiter, it’s not worth how many of the key insights into the problem have now been given away for free! Now we’ll get a more homogenous, less interesting field.
If it turns out you really have some fiendishly clever way to exploit the entire MimicBot clique you just ensured, I’ll half-forgive you when you win the contest, but that does not seem likely.
There are some interesting insights left you haven’t given away, but I beg anyone else who thinks of them to keep them to their self until after the contest.