Inspired by the relatively good performance of the DiscardPlayer, and the discovery that I'd misunderstood the scoring system - I decided to write another player from scratch (though reusing the knowledge gatherer from my bredplayer). http://members.iinet.net.au/~soxbox/always_positive.rb My new player will not play any cards into a land unless he has enough cards and enough time to overcome the -20 starting penalty for a land. He'll pick up any cards that help him, and once he hits the endgame, will start playing high-cards rather than low. Some areas where you'd probably get some improvement are in the discarding of cards, which is pretty rudimentary. It should probably discard in order of unusable_for_anybody_ever -> unusable_for_opponent_ever -> minimise_opponent_points. He'd probably be improved further by actually taking a chance towards the start of the game if it can't get a guaranteed hand. Playing all the players against each other with 50 games in each matchup (everybody plays 300 total): Class Wins Avg. Min. Max. Time AlwaysPositive 222 22.52 0.00 76.00 31.49 ADS_LC_Player 220 41.05 -71.00 266.00 80.94 EvolvedPlayer 203 27.52 -101.00 217.00 75.84 BredPlayer 164 3.75 -149.00 91.00 63.58 DiscardPlayer 113 0.00 0.00 0.00 11.45 DumbPlayer 110 -11.44 -88.00 65.00 14.26 RiskPlayer 16 -41.51 -120.00 -7.00 25.13 As the top 3 are so close, I did separates run of 200 games between each of them: Class Wins Avg. Min. Max. Time ADS_LC_Player 121 39.94 -44.00 154.00 49.91 AlwaysPositive 78 28.09 0.00 104.00 21.63 So it seems that ADS_LC_Player is actually better than the evolved player (so much for genetics), and they're both better than my AlwaysPositive player, but I came out on top in the full match because I ALWAYS beat RiskPlayer and either win or draw against DiscardPlayer. I'm guessing that my player would be better at beating an amateur player, but the ADS_LC_Player would provide more challenge for an experienced player. The "Time" column is indicative only - it measures the time taken for the game.play and game.draw moves to occur, but that also includes a bunch of show calls to both players, so it skews the figures. ##################################################################################### This email has been scanned by MailMarshal, an email content filter. #####################################################################################