riddler-castles/castle-solutions-2: 31

This directory contains the data behind the submissions for castles puzzle.

castle-solutions.csv contains the submissions for Can You Rule Riddler Nation?
castle-solutions-2.csv contains the submissions for The Battle For Riddler Nation, Round 2
castle-solutions-3.csv contains the submissions for Are You The Best Warlord?
castle-solutions-4.csv contains the submissions for A Peaceful (But Not Peaceful) Transition Of Power In Riddler Nation
castle-solutions-5.csv contains the submissions for The Fifth Battle For Riddler Nation, in which there were 13 castles rather than the usual 10

Readers were asked to submit a strategy for the following “Colonel Blotto”-style game:

In a distant, war-torn land, there are 10 castles. There are two warlords: you and your archenemy. Each castle has its own strategic value for a would-be conqueror. Specifically, the castles are worth 1, 2, 3, …, 9, and 10 victory points. You and your enemy each have 100 soldiers to distribute, any way you like, to fight at any of the 10 castles. Whoever sends more soldiers to a given castle conquers that castle and wins its victory points. If you each send the same number of troops, you split the points. You don’t know what distribution of forces your enemy has chosen until the battles begin. Whoever wins the most points wins the war.

Submit a plan distributing your 100 soldiers among the 10 castles. Once I receive all your battle plans, I’ll adjudicate all the possible one-on-one matchups. Whoever wins the most wars wins the battle royale and is crowned king or queen of Riddler Nation!

The data includes all valid submissions, with solvers’ identifying information removed. The 11 columns represent the soldiers deployed to each of the 10 castles, plus a column where the reader could describe his or her strategic approach.

Correction

Please see the following commit: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/commit/c3f808fda5b67aa26ea6fa663ddd4d2eb7c6187f

Data license: CC Attribution 4.0 License · Data source: fivethirtyeight/data on GitHub · About: simonw/fivethirtyeight-datasette

This data as json, copyable

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?
31	1	4	4	4	16	21	22	4	11	13	Previous data suggests 2 and 3 were good choices for your "throw-off" castles, as you beat the large swath of 0s and 1s. I believe that 4 is the "new 2" as people will respond to this, being more likely to throw a 2 or 3 on a castle than a 0 or 1. There will be an arms race to grab the 10 and 9 on the cheap (the winner did so because he won something like 40% of the time on those castles for only 2 troop investment). Now people will be responding by putting 4 troops there, and then there will be people trying to next-level those people. I want to be near the top of the next-levelers, because these are key castles, but I still want to lose by a lot to the people that go huge on these to maintain an overwhelming advantage elsewhere. On castle 8, I think people will respond in two ways, after seeing that people really fought over this castle last time. They will either not enter the fight, or they will enter the fray hard. I chose to throw off, but selected 4 to beat the other people who threw off with 2s and 3s.