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Answer by abstractapplic52

By imitating other players

As Jay Bailey mentioned, you can look at how other players approached challenges, and copy the approaches that worked. Pablo Repetto’s playthroughs of three early .scis seem particularly worthwhile given your situation, both because of how comprehensive & well-written they are, and because they were made by someone in the process of learning to use code on data science problems (the first playthrough was done in pure Excel, the other two were handled in Python).

By following a sensible strategy

Below is my standard plan for investigating a dataset, synthetic or otherwise (cribbed from an otherwise-mediocre Udacity course I took most of a decade ago, and still worth following).

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Univariate Analysis: How is each feature distributed when considered in isolation? You should probably make a histogram for each column.

Bivariate Analysis: Construct and check the correlation matrix between all features. Are there clusters? Create scatterplots (or equivalent) for any pair of features which correlate unusually strongly, any pair of features where at least one is a response variable, and any pair of features you find yourself curious about.

Feature Derivation: Based on what you’ve seen so far – and/or common sense – are there meaningful features you can create from what you’ve been provided? (i.e., if you’re given "Number of Wizards", "Number of Sorcerors" and "Number of Druids" for each row, it might be worth creating a “Total Number of Magic Users” column.) Investigate how these features interact with others.

ML Modelling: If you can, and it seems like a good idea, build an ML model predicting the important/unknown features from those you have. If constructed successfully, this becomes an oracle you can ask about the outcome of any possible choice you could make. (XGBoost and similar tools are extremely versatile, and have pretty good performance on most problems.)

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(The above is just a rough guide for what to do when you don’t know what to do. If you follow it, you should pretty quickly find yourself with a list of rabbitholes to fall down; you should probably err on the side of dropping everything and deviating from the path as soon as you find something interesting.)

By playing easier D&D.Scis

Difficulty of D&D.Sci games tends to be both high and high-variance; it’s usually assumed that players will have both data-manipulation and model-building skills. For what it’s worth, I can confirm that two relatively-approachable scenarios where not-using-ML won't put you at a disadvantage are (spoilered because this technically leaks information about them):

If I'm following your notation right, it looks like you mixed up Flamethrowers and Miniguns.

I'm glad you liked it!

(. . . could you spoiler your strategy and win chance? I know this challenge is three years old, and what you mention here isn't game-breaking info, but I want to keep it possible for people looking/playing through the archives to seek clarifications in the comments without unwittingly/unwillingly learning anything else about the scenario.)

The leaderboard will track how well you've done relative to random/best play at the # of soldiers you chose to bring.

Could you elaborate on this? I think I'd do better relative to best play with

high numbers of soldiers,

and do better relative to random play with

 low numbers of soldiers,

so it's not clear which way I should lean; also, I don't know how you plan to quantify "relative to".

What we're facing:

  • A horrifying number of Tyrants,
  • A large quantity of Scarabs and Abominations, and
  • A below-par-given-they-showed-up-at-all-but-still-significantly-above-zero count of Crawlers and Venompedes.

Relevant Weapons:

  • Artillery is the optimal counter for Tyrants.
  • Miniguns are very good at handling Scarabs (to the point that bringing more than one would likely be overkill), and pretty useless at most handling most other xenos (to the point that bringing more than one would likely harm our chances).
  • Lances are good counters for anything which isn't a Tyrant or a Scarab. (And also not-terrible vs Tyrants)
  • Torpedos are slightly better than Lances when facing Abominations, and only slightly worse than Artillery when facing Tyrants.
  • (As far as I can tell, the other four weapons aren't worth considering.)

Current strategies per number of soldiers:

8 Soldiers: 3 Artillery, 2 Lances, 1 Minigun, 2 Torpedos.

(My model says this gives me >99% chance of survival, but also says that about just bringing one of every weapon. We can be more daring!)

7 Soldiers: 3 Artillery, 2 Lances, 1 Minigun, 1 Torpedo.

(My model says this gives me ~95% chance of survival.)

6 Soldiers: 2 Artillery, 2 Lances, 1 Minigun, 1 Torpedo.

(My model says this gives me about a 2/3 chance of waking up the next morning.)

5 Soldiers: 2 Artillery, 1 Lance, 1 Minigun, 1 Torpedo.

(My model says this has slightly worse odds than a game of Russian Roulette with five bullets loaded.)

4 Soldiers: 1 Artillery, 1 Lance, 1 Minigun, 1 Torpedo.

(My model says this almost gives me an entire 1% survival chance.)

If I have to pick one strategy:

7 Soldiers: 3 Artillery, 2 Lances, 1 Minigun, 1 Torpedo.

Description of an investigative cul-de-sac:

I notice that

  • Duels between a Tyrant and an Artilleryman always end well.
  • Duels between a Tyrant and a Minigunner, Phaser or Flamethrower always end badly.
  • Tyrant vs Artilleryman 2v2s . . . don't happen, ever. (Turns out the quartermasters do display some nonrandom behaviors, and one of these is a bias towards weapon variety.)
  • 2v2s involving two Tyrants, an Artilleryman, and someone who'd lose a 1v1 against a Tyrant . . . end well pretty much exactly half the time, regardless of which [MPF] is used.

I reason that

This is what we'd see in a turn-based fight where humans aggressively heroically always take the first move, and the xenos move randomly. The Artilleryman caps a Tyrant every time; the remaining Tyrant then picks a random human to squish; they pick the dud half the time; we get the coinflip we see.

But then

I find out that there are 2v1 fights between two Tyrants and a lone Artilleryman, and these have the exact same 50% win chance; the dud isn't even useful as a decoy; my hypothesis is falsified.

From all this I conclude

Absolutely nothing.

Like, conceptually it's absolutely unpredictable

That's exactly what I was going for; I wanted phenomena which couldn't have been predicted without using the dataset.

Misc. prelim notes:

  • There's a random element. (Existence proof: 16079 and 17759 were the same fight but we only lost 17759.)
  • There's an implicit chrono effect: It looks like this war has been developing not necessarily to our advantage. (Luckily it seems like this is probably 'just' enemies outnumbering our troops more frequently in later rows, and not anyone actually getting better/worse at their job.)
  • The number of troops sent scales with the size of the enemy forces, making inference trickier; however, I haven't seen anything contradicting the hypothesis that loadouts are decided by throwing darts at a board.
  • Specific weapons counter specific enemies: in particular, the Minigun is usually pretty lousy, but drops Scarabs like flies.
  • I expected to find synergies between weapons, and didn't. I did, however, find some antisynergies: Miniguns and Flamethrowers are hella redundant (presumably because they're both anti-Scarab bugspray), and the [MPR] set all clash with each other ("Why do you need Gun? You already have Gun!")
  • Guaranteed victories seem possible. (A single soldier with a minigun can perfectly-reliably survive 5 Scarabs, but not 6.)

Thanks for running this when my one was going to be late, and thanks for checking with me beforehand.

(Also, thanks for the scenario, like, in general: it looks like a fun one!)

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