I have tried, but not very successfully.

The first problem is the huge game tree complexity. What I did here was adapt the general idea of UCT to include dynamically expanding tree width. That is, when initially creating a node, I populate it with a few heuristically generated moves. Then I dynamically add random moves when the node is visited often. The obvious flaw is that the node is only visited often when the heuristic moves are good, so an extremely good followup that's completely different than the heuristics is extremely unlikely to be found. But on the other hand, visiting each possible move at least once just isn't practical when there are millions of possible moves at each point

The second problem is performance. My implementation just isn't able to search more than about 100k nodes a second, and that just doesn't seem enough to generate good moves.

The end result is that my MCTS/UCT bot is not really much better than my currently submitted "stupid" bot (which is currently ranked 485 after all ).

At least one person (forget who) in the top 50 was doing UCT/MCTS. I think it's pretty clear you can't use random playouts in this game, the move generator needs some intelligence. I did UCT to find the optimal order in which to achieve my goals.

My program was too complicated for the amount of time I had to write it, too many bugs and I didn't get even a small amount of what I wanted finished. Oh well, hopefully next time they'll pick something that doesn't interest me so I don't lose every second of my life for another three months...

Still, I guess #262 isn't a horrible finish.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Here is the winner: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/hung ... ntest/2131

Here is his blog: http://quotenil.com/Planet-Wars-Post-Mortem.html

The source code is available and very nicely commented.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

At least I beat space.invaders!

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com