Introduction

In real life, Mount Olympus is the biggest mountain of the solar system, 21 km high (13 miles). It is located on the planet Mars.

In this Web page, Mt Olympus is a hill with room for everyone.

What is it ?

Mt Olympus is an "infinite" hill. There is room for an unlimited number of fighters.

Mt Olympus includes every published warrior (provided it was written for the hill parameters).

How to read it

The current status lists all the warriors on the hill. You can click on the rank to get the source code. Clicking on the number of battles of a warrior (for example, SplitBomb) is more interesting. It lists all warriors that have fought SplitBomb, sorted by their score against SplitBomb. In other words, it shows which warriors are better against SplitBomb. In this list, the win/lose/tie percentages and the scores are exact (not rounded), because I run each battle as 5x200 rounds.

How it works

Running all the battles (about one million of them) would take too much time. To add a warrior to the hill, I do the following:

1. Run the newcomer against 50 programs taken at random (with an even spread) from the current rankings.
2. Re-do the rankings, taking these 50 battles into account (in addition to all previous battles).
3. Compute a set of battles: the top 25 against every other, and each warrior against the 10 above and the 10 below it.
4. Run the battles of this set that haven't been run already.
5. Re-do the rankings.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until there are no new battles in the set.

In the end, every program will have fought the top 25, and the 10 above and below itself, plus some others. With a little luck, this gives a meaningful score to each warrior. Note that the first 25 do have a meaningful score, because they fought every other warrior (self-fights are not included).

New: When there is no warrior in the holding pen, we now look for the first warrior that didn't fight every warrior above it, and make it fight the missing battles (then repeat steps 3-5 above). The long-term goal is to do all the battles, the short-term goal is to do all the interesting battles.

Related work

Christoph Birk's Koenigstuhl is based on the same idea, but he does fewer rounds per battle, so the results come in much faster. And it's still alive, while Mt Olympus hasn't been updated in years (and I don't know whether it will ever be).