Procrastinating Rank 1 in Splinterlands

Developing a Splinterlands Bot is both fascinating and frustrating at the same time. I've been working on mine for 6 months, but I'm still not in the Top 50 and neither in the Top 10.

Procrastination

The main issue is my unyielding determination to procrastinate. Pretty much since the start, I intended to implement the universal "algorithm" to get good at any game. Alpha Zero. Or by now, Mu Zero.

The method requires no human input, just a computer program trying to beat itself indefinitely. Nothing but the game rules. Plus some machine learning magic. It's younger brother Mu Zero works even without rules.

Now, what did I actually do in those 6 months? I implemented the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm from scratch, wrote a simulation of the Splinterlands Battle Simulator. The first part is needed for Alpha Zero, the second is optional. But for some reason, I didn't program the rest. Probably because of my irrational distaste of neural networks.

But now I've started working on that part. Pretty much because I can't do anything else. Classic Temporal Difference Learning- doesn't work. Breadth-first initialisation - nope. RAVE - double nope. Thompson Sampling - comparable.
I hope I'll finish soonish because Hive account@wonsama with his Deep Reinforcement Learning approach plays pretty successfully. He did pretty good work on his bot.