by requireing 2 points to evo it would prevent the perching of solutions at .999 which now means anyone can evo. if this is a game of skill, and not just how many team members can jump on the top evo and pack the evo with just there own players. by requiring 2 points to evo at lease the players with the most skill can still evo , but everyone would have to advance the score at least one point even if the evo is pearched at a high fraction. this would help all teams with scoreing evos more fair and equil and based on skill not just team size.
This is an interesting proposal. What do others think? Would making the requirement 3 or even 5 points be better?
No, that option would still be easily "gamed" by the teams that depend on ganging up on Evolver scores.
It just requires lowering the behavior, wiggling until the score drops 3 or 5 points,. uploading it, and let the whole gang wiggle it back up until it evolves. Now they ahve successsfully stacked the top of the evolver ranks.
It's stacking the ranks with everyone evolving the same solution that needs to be addressed.
No Brick, it used to work like that, but it doesn't any more (since late last year some time).
When you upload an evolver it remembers your top score, so even if you lower your score and upload your "not quite best", the evolvers will still have to beat your "very best" score.
I think the idea of a 2 point evolver could be worth trying out. Some puzzles tend to have a narrower degree of variance (like a non-mutating interface puzzle), so more than 2 points to evolve could be pretty challenging for those types of puzzles. But other puzzles with a lot of variance (like de novos) could probably do with more than 2 points to evolve.
But if you want an across the board number, I would go with Kimo's suggestion of a 2 point gain for evolvers and see what happens.
Brick:
Your concern is a valid one, and one possible refinement would be requiring a certain amount of change in backbone configuration (which is possible given the recently-developed contact map feature). But the downside of this approach is that side chain tweaks that increase the score by more than 2 points but otherwise leave the backbone relatively constant would not be accepted. So, I would say that requiring a gain of 2 points is a reasonable compromise.
thank you all for your support and great ideas. so lets try 2 point evos and see what happens. thanks
But there's a problem with this scenario, can you see it:
Team A: 80521
Team B: 80520
..it's in your advantage (Team A) to perch the score at a low Even number (or Odd, depending on your nearest competitor), just in case a teammmate can't evo.
Team A: 80522 <- Perched at an even score
Team B: 80520 <- Now Team B player, if he can't gain the lead with a 2-point evo, himself, must force a fellow player to evo again (twice) to gain the lead
A better suggestion would be to have each successive evo increase the evo requirement by 1 point.
Re: Seagat2011
I see a false dichotomy in your example… surely Team B can evolve the 80520 solution to 80523 to take the lead? After all, the only thing that raising the bar to 2 points is that the solution won't register until 80522 is reached; it doesn't stop the same individual who evolved 80520 to 80522 to squeeze out one more point once the solution is counted by the system.
Oops, there was a typo in my last post. "the only thing that raising the bar to 2 points is that the solution won't register" should read "the only thing that raising the bar to 2 points DOES is that the solution won't register."
My vote: 0.05% or 5 pts (what is less, but 1pt at least) for evo.
It should be count from downloaded solution (ie sol1: 8600, sol2: 8500 -> when we have loaded sol2 evo after 8504 even if we load sol1 b4 sol2).
