riddler-castles/castle-solutions: 267
Data license: CC Attribution 4.0 License · Data source: fivethirtyeight/data on GitHub · About: simonw/fivethirtyeight-datasette
rowid | Castle 1 | Castle 2 | Castle 3 | Castle 4 | Castle 5 | Castle 6 | Castle 7 | Castle 8 | Castle 9 | Castle 10 | Why did you choose your troop deployment? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
267 | 3 | 7 | 10 | 14 | 17 | 21 | 24 | 1 | 1 | 2 | The simplest strategy is to distribute troops evenly, in proportion to the 55 points available. That yields the average expected value of ~ 1/2 point per troop. But, we only need to get to 28 to win. I played with a number of strategies where people won only high value castles (25 points on each of castles 1+8+9+10 wins, for instance). But, those strategies leave vulnerable the other castles for picking by a sole attacker. So, I chose to attack every castle with at least one, but to focus on the lowest seven for a win (1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 28). I threw one person on castles 8-10, so if they are left undefended I have a chance of picking off a high value one. But I have 97 points distributed on the lowest value seven. It can be beat, but not by the first several options in game theory. Like the quick question about 2/3rds of the average guess, there is no theoretical right answer. We have to assess how many people will pick which strategy, and then pick a strategy in response to that. |