God's Dice
Yay! There is a new Virtual Source Programming Contest: “God’s Dice”
After a bit of a messy start of the contest, within hours three people had a 100% score (almost, 99.99% due to some rounding errors). This sparked James, the organizer, to change the rules a bit. Now the contest is running smoothly, the loophole is removed.
The goal of the contest is this:
- Take a cube, with all sides length 1
- Place N (9 to 88) points anywhere on the surface of the cube
- Now calculate the surface area of all triangles between your points
- Your score is: totalSurfaceArea * (smallestTriangleSurfaceArea ^ 2)
So basically you need to create triangles as large as possible, BUT, all triangles need to be large. One smaller triangle will exponentially screw up the score.
Up to now I’ve only written a scorer and a basic random searcher just to get myself on the leaderboard. Now it is time to do something a bit smarter, maybe just a better search algorithm, but I’ll probably need something a lot smarter, incorporating geometric knowledge. For example, moving one point changes all triangles involved. So we could test only these triangles to see if they improve (instead of re-testing the whole cube).
And I’ve got some other idea’s, which I won’t share obviously for the contest sake!