Finals Day 1 round-up

[This article was really pitched at colleagues / family, so the GGP regulars will know most of the detail.]

Over 8 hours yesterday, our player, “Sancho”, played 18 matches and finished at the top of the table, more than a complete game clear of the next nearest opponent.  We lost 1 game (where we were playing second in a game against a significant 1^st-player bias) and dropped a few points here and there on some of the other games.

Player	Games	Points	Average
Sancho	18	1612	90
General	18	1478	82
QFWFQ	18	1472	82
Galvanise	18	1429	79
---- LeJoueur	18	1412	78
TurboTurtle	18	1356	75
Gamer	18	1325	74
Alloy	18	1300	72
Dumalion	18	1272	71
MINIPlayer	18	1230	68
Knower	18	1038	58
LICAgent	18	1027	57
==== QuorumPlayer	18	1017	57
MonkSaki	18	964	54
Valor	18	790	44
Ary	18	740	41
AIRush	18	491	27

Here are the games we played (where you can see us in action, turn-by-turn, by pressing the left/right arrows).

·         Alquerque – a non-zero sum game.  Capturing an opponent’s piece gets you 10 points.  You play 10 moves each.  Trading pieces is good in this stage of the tournament because everybody is involved in a match of this.  Therefore a 90/100 loss is better than a 10/0 win.
·         Breakthrough – try to get a pawn to the other side of the board.  This ought to have been a real showcase game for us – but a technical glitch means our match wasn't saved, so the sample shown is some of our competitors playing.
·         Pentago is like noughts and crosses, with a twist (literally).  There are 4 boards in a grid.  On each turn you make your mark and then twist the board.  5 in a row to win.  We won this playing first and second (which is much harder).
·         9-board tic-tac-toe.  The position you play on your turn defines the board that your opponent must play on in the next turn.  Another game with a 1^st-player bias, we won playing first, but lost playing second.
·         Hex – connect the edges of the board.  Your opponent is trying to do the same at right angles to you.  This was played whilst I was sleeping – looks like a complete walk-over.
·         Chinook is two games of draughts played simultaneously (on the white and black squares).  Points scored for taking opponent pieces – but only on the board that’s the same colour as your opponent’s pieces.  Not the best game, because you’re allowed to pass – meaning that you can force your opponent to score 0 (by never moving on the board he scores on) – which we duly did.  The visualization only works in Chrome.
·         Duidoku – a two-player game played on a Sudoku grid.  But you aren’t trying to complete the grid.  Instead, you’re trying to make it such that your opponent doesn’t have a legal play (i.e. can’t put any number in any cell without violating one of the Sudoku constraints).  We hadn’t seen this before and, by the look of the results, it has a strong 1^st-player bias.  Since it was only played one way round, I suspect we got lucky here.
·         And a contrived tic-tac-toe based game that isn’t worth describing (or looking at).

And here are the puzzles (1-player games) that we solved.

·         A Hamiltonian cycle.
·         Hunter – which is a Knight’s Tour on a board of a size where a complete tour isn’t possible.
·         And the same on a much bigger board – where we didn’t manage an optimal solution, dropping 7 points.
·         A sliding tiles puzzle, which we solved in the smallest possible number of moves.
·         Sudoku, where we were one of just 2 players to solve it.
·         Also three contrived puzzles with no useful visualization.

This evening and into the early hours of tomorrow (UK time), the top 12 teams in the table above will compete in a double-elimination tournament to declare the 2014 champion.