“The Galcon Prize is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve the Galcon rankings system! Galcon is a winner-takes-all multi-player game for 2-4 players. Entries are to be written in python. The prize is an 8GB iPod Touch. Entries must be uploaded by Oct 5.”

I’ve updated the dataset with way more data … so you’ll want to download that.

Here are the mid-contest results:

 1. rafsoaken        452.44  0:20 [-407,836]
 2. codepenguin      452.42  0:20 [431,1392]
 3. mewo2            452.36  0:19 [167,1601]
 4. azbuky           451.46  0:16 [54,903]
 5. fl0yd13          450.88  0:14 [103,7400]
 6. paulatreides     449.94  0:16 [0,24990]
 7. elo              449.93  0:18 [415,1352]
 8. adamzap          446.13  0:18 [0,7]
 9. simple           445.15  0:13 [-9922,6624]
10. mithrandir       440.20  0:28 [-33,1019]
11. percent          438.49  0:14 [0,100]
12. kester           424.54  0:13 [1,502]
13. rounds           387.33  0:12 [1,10710]
14. noop             317.46  0:11 [0,0]
15. bad              224.82  0:12 [-3803,0]

So .. It looks like the results are REALLY close .. The scoring is basically a percentage of how often the algorithm guesses correctly. So all the top entries are in the 45% correct zone. This is a nice improvement over my current algorithm which is at 43% correct.

Also, be sure to to keep uploading your entries throughout the week, I’ll try and post an update every day or so with the current standings so you can see how you are doing.  I may be testing your entries against NEW data that you will not have access to, in order to test how well your algorithm handles data it hasn’t previously trained against.  So watching for updates on the results will be quite valuable.

Also, rafsoaken sent me a histogram viewer function, which I’ve added to gprize.py. Run it with -histogram to see a visual of how your numbers are spreading. I’ll probably be using that to help me decide if an entry will really “work” for Galcon.

Hey – my healthcare business is hiring! Yay!

We’re looking for someone who lives in western New York, is a pythonic PHP coder, and enjoys consulting and software maintenance.

Here’s the full listing at monster and at craigslist.

Cheers!
-Phil

Hey, so I’ve never been feeling overly smart about how my rankings system works.  And quite a few of you have expressed interest in hacking on the stats data or trying to improve the ranks some way.  So here’s your chance!

Introducing The Galcon Prize!

“The Galcon Prize is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve the Galcon rankings system! Galcon is a winner-takes-all multi-player game for 2-4 players. Entries are to be written in python. The prize is an 8GB iPod Touch. Entries must be uploaded by Oct 5.”

Check it out, and have some fun!  🙂  If all works well, in a few weeks Galcon rankings will be considerably more-awesomer 🙂

-Phil

Watermelons is the ultimate fruit rescue mission game! The local watermelon tree has gone berserk and is producing fresh watermelons at an amazing rate.

You must move your trampoline at high speed in order to save the melons from splattering horribly on the ground. You get ten slip-ups before you lose your job as the Melon Master.

Includes high scores, realistic watermelon sound effects and authentic watermelon bouncing soundtrack.

Watermelons was first created in several hours using python+pygame.  I then ported it to haxe.  And then last of all, I ported it to the iPhone / iPod touch using C code.  I suppose the dev lesson learned is .. rapid prototyping stuff in python is really quick and easy.  So when I port a game from python to something else, I’ve got the whole game concept down, so it’s fairly straight forward to switch to a static language like C.  If say, the problem was not well defined, I suspect it would be harder to implement the games in C first.  (I think my statement here was particularly true for porting Galcon to the iPhone.)

Anyway, check out the flash version, and if you think it’s worth your 0.99, you can get it on the App Store now 🙂

Hey, one of the Galcon-iPhone users is really doing his best to help me get the word out! He’s put up a digg article linking to an awesome youtube video he made demoing the gameplay on the iphone 🙂 Spread the word – and check out the sweet video!

Hey, I attended PAX’08. It was a pretty crazy ride! I gotta say, if I go again, I’m going to make sure I get more than 4 hours of sleep per night though 🙂

Some of the highlights of the trip were:

• Stacking cans for the Brawndo booth
• taking pictures of costumery
• Listening to the musicians panel
• meeting Mike and Sol of hamumu.com fame
• watching and hearing some gameboy street musicians

I’ll let you work out which pics go with which highlight.