riddler-castles/castle-solutions: 1067
Data source: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/blob/master/riddler-castles/castle-solutions.csv
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? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1067 | 0 | 0 | 14 | 15 | 0 | 15 | 15 | 39 | 1 | 1 | The most general strategy for defeating "random" deployments is to pick a set of castles representing a majority of points. Most obvious would be the high-point castles, and in fact if you look at the 27 combinations of four castles that add up to 28 points or more, each of the top three castles are required for at least 17 of the 27. So, we expect most strategies to rely on two or more of the top three castles plus two others (25,0,25,0,25,0,25,0,0,0). The available approaches to beat these baseline strategies are: 1) Claim two of those three with overwhelming strength and pick two more with sufficient strength to pick them up against token support (0,37,37,0,13,13,0,0,0,) 2) Figure that almost everyone wants to use either the 9-point castle or the 10-point castle and overload that, then spread the rest fairly widely expecting to pick up the holes in the opponent's broken strategy (1,51,8,8,8,8,8,8,0,0) 3) Execute the strategy more or less directly, trying to claim three of the top four with strength, then choosing a fourth castle to claim with less than overwhelming support. (1,26,26,26,1,17,1,1,1,0) 4) Pick a strategy that requires winning five castles that do not include the top two. (1,1,41,14,14,1,14,14,0,0) Of these, the third seems the weakest--the others break it. Counterintuitively, the fourth strategy is the most successful. Going hard after the 8-point castle leaves enough points to pick four others against token support that other strategies can afford after preparing to win one of the top two castles. The disadvantage is that it fails against even support Variations include how many troops to send as tokens to the other castles, hoping to pick up all of the points from an undefended castle. |