Ragnarok | Results from the Worlcup of 02/22/2014

The Viking mythology predicted that Saturday, February 22, 2014 would be the day of Ragnarok, an apocalyptic end of the world where Men, Gods and Giants would fight in an ultimate battle from which no-one would come back alive.

To celebrate the occasion (especially as it was going to be the last one), we wanted a big challenge. This is how those among you who joined the battle could incarnate a young Thor, struggling against his brother Loki's plots, and fighting hard against a horde of furious Fire Giants on the Vigrid plains.

Gawen's (1st place overall) game replay

THE PUZZLES

1st puzzle: The Power of Thor

This first puzzle was not too difficult. You had to go from point A to point B on the map in order to reach the power of lightning and restore Thor's hammer's precious strength. To succeed, you just had to think of taking the shortest path. 

2nd puzzle: Thor VS Giants

That one was tricky. You goal: annihilate all the Giants with your lightning power, knowing that you had a limited number of lightning bolts to use. The Giants always came towards Thor, so the flee strategy that consisted in going towards the Giants to attract them and then turn and walk away to secure a sufficient distance to strike with a lightning could work, especially if you moved towards the Giants' barycenter. The other difficulty was to choose the most appropriate moment to strike: not too far from the Giants, and not too late :)

You can redo the Ragnarok challenge via the training page:

PODIUM & RANKINGS

Even if this contest was finally shorter that previous ones, it took the first contestants quite a while to reach 100% :) Gawen finished first in 01:35:51 in Java, followed by redvasily (01:49:16 in Python) and by Zoyd (02:04:08 in Java too). Two Java advocates on the podium, it's a first for CodinGame... ;) 

The rankings and the leaderboard by language with the link to the source code of participants are here: http://www.codingame.com/cg/#!ranking:23

To see the source code of the participants with a replay of their fights click the buttons { }

Use the "play" buttons next to the validators to see all game replays:

The ratio between entrants and finishers is really good, with, overall, a shorter duration to complete the challenge.

As far as language popularity is concerned, C++ and Java are first in the Top 5, followed by Python, PHP, and C.

THE CODINGAME PLANET

Entrants come from 57 different countries, the Top 10 most represented countries being: France, India, Morocco, Russia, Ukraine, Tunisia, USA, Brazil, UK and Italy.

FINAL WORD(S)

[20:19] <skypers_> that challenge was just…

 [20:19] <skypers_> AWESOME!

[20:30] <I208iN> Won't get a reward this time :P Anyway, the concept was excellent ! I really liked mission to mars, but I loved this one

 [20:44] <pulse_> it's a good thing there's a challenge every month : if it was every week, I guess I wouldn't have any saturday evening free anymore ^^

Ready for Kirk's Quest ?