riddler-castles/castle-solutions: 20

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 source: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/blob/master/riddler-castles/castle-solutions.csv

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?
20	15	13	13	14	14	14	14	1	1	1	Contrarian strategy to go for bottom 7 (which sums to 28) rather than 10+9+8+another. Putting 1 on 8,9,10 to beat people who may use a similar strategy but forget that by getting these higher ones they win vs similar strategies. Higher on 1 to beat strategies that realize that 10+9+8+1=28 and guess 100/7=14 is lowest bound to beat on 1 (and assume people would pretty much always put the least amount of soldiers on castle 1). Even if using 10+9+8+other, unlikely to use higher than 12 or 13 on the lower castle because of the need to focus on top heavy. Strategies that assign soldiers based on castle value mostly beaten (unless using smoothing factor but this would lose to most top heavy strategies). Also beats 10 everywhere. Will see!