riddler-castles/castle-solutions: 1095
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? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1095 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 27 | 30 | 33 | A good strategy needs to achieve a number of goals: 1) It should deploy troops in proportion to the number of points to be won 2) It should concentrate on getting enough points to win, rather than trying to win all of the points 3) It should be robust against opponents who make small deviations from the same strategy 4) It should beat every obvious strategy There are 55 points available but only 28 points are required to win. Therefore, most of the troops are concentrated on winning castles 8, 9 and 10, for which 27 points are available. The remainder of the troops are concentrated on trying to win castle 3, rather than trying to win castle 7. This is because castle 7 will be more competitive than castle 3, and deploying a proportionate number of troops to win castle 7 will be a waste of resources which could be used to fight for the other castles. This strategy is robust against another strategy which leaves a lot of the smaller castles undefended. Even if it lost castle 9 or castle 10 to such an opponent, it would still win because of the split points at the castles ignored by both sides. It would lose to a strategy which attempted to win castle 1 rather than castle 3 but it has an advantage over the latter strategy in that it would beat the "obvious" strategy of putting 10 troops on each castle, while the latter strategy would not. |