My humble solution to the CodinGame 2022 Spring Challenge

Participated in the CodinGame 2022 Spring Challenge. It turned out to be a fascinating experience at the intersection of psychology and IT.

What does psychology have to do with any of this? Simply this: in this challenge, you write code to command a trio of «little soldiers» tasked with fending off monsters and outmaneuvering your opponents.

I implemented a weighted decision-making system. Every potential action is assigned a specific weight, calculated not only from the current state of the game world but also from an array of numbers that constitute the unique «personality» of each individual soldier.

Since the numbers differ, so do their personalities. The soldiers make their in-game choices based on these numerical traits. Consequently, at any given moment, I never know exactly what a specific soldier will do. I am only guiding them implicitly, having assigned these numerical «personalities» before the match even began. And there you have psychology in action. :)

Yet, these little guys act with surprising «reason» and «deliberation». You can see for yourself here: https://www.codingame.com/replay/622584657

I didn't secure any prize-winning spots, and for good reason:

1. I was writing the code rather casually in my spare time, which is currently in short supply;

2. The CodinGame platform itself offered no built-in way to optimize the soldiers' personalities using a simple neural network or a GA. Frankly, I had no desire to manually brute-force various combinations of 18 (3 soldiers × 6 personality traits) floating-point numbers.

Nevertheless, it was a great deal of fun. I have open-sourced the code and uploaded it to GitHub. Welcome: https://github.com/rexTexTau/CodinGame2022SpringChallengeSolutio

May 4, 2022, 9:13 PM