riddler-castles/castle-solutions-3: 747

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?
747	4	1	6	1	1	20	0	32	0	35	Goal is to take castles 1, 3, 6, 8, 10 for a winning 28 points. Single points in castles 2, 4, 5 are to tie with other people who put a single point in their castles or win against people who put 0 points in there castles. On a weighted percentage any opponent who puts more into castle 10, 8 or 6 is drastically overvaluing these castles (since you need half the points to tie any castle with more than double its weighted percentage is overvalued) and may beat me but will not be beating the majority of other opponents. I slightly undervalued castle 10 and castle 6, because I anticipate heavy investment in castles 8 and 9. Concerns are a skew to castle 3 in response to round 2 and that naive strategies (say 0 0 0 0 0 0 20 20 20 40) that are more top heavy are prevalent enough in the 538 reader base that I cannot win castles 10, 8, 6, and 3 consistently. Interestingly enough an even distribution of (10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10) beats my distribution and the top 5 distributions from round 2. I assume however that most of the 538 reader base will not submit such a simplistic submission. My distribution beats the top 5 from round 2, but loses to the 3 of the top 5 from round 1. I do not anticipate to win round 3, but am anticipating many readers will play similar strategies.