riddler-castles/castle-solutions-2: 86

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

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?
86 0 3 13 18 18 3 23 3 11 8 Several months have passed since the battle of a thousand armies and a new general arrives on the battle torn lands with a sizeable army behind him. He believes that the practice of sending only one soldier to battle in the hope it would be abandoned, which was common in the first war is unethical and he vowed to send at least 3 fine soldiers to each battle, if one got wounded the plan was that one would stay behind and the other would return for help. With that in mind he still had 70 troops to send out. The general was greedy and decided he liked the look of the two largest castles, one as his home and the other as a guest house so he sent a sizeable platoon to those two. Expecting to secure at least one of the two palaces he admired most he set his 60 remaining loyal soldiers to fight for 4 other palaces. He decided to send some troops to the third outpost, a small group of buildings barley worth fighting over. The forth and fifth castles also looked inviting so he sent an larger group to them. He then had 20 soldiers left over, all eager for battle. He decided that they would be best suited to attacking the seventh fort, a fine set of buildings which were reasonably contested in previous battles. He decided that this would be where his stronghold would be and decided to command the army from there. The night before the attack a trio of soldier approached the general saying they were told to attack the smallest of the forts. They thought that their attack was pointless and against many enemies they wouldn't be needed so they requested to be promoted. The general considered this that night and in the morning he approached the three soldiers and told them he agreed with them and thought they would be more useful to him in the squadron fighting for his proposed guest house. Finally he was set for battle and gave the order to attack to his officers. The army crested the hill, ready for the fight. "ATTACK" the general screamed...