Results and Tournament Analysis

Overall, our player did very well. When all the games had played, we had received the following rankings:

Figure 3: Group 3 cookie

Figure 4: H cookie

Figure 5: Arrow cookie

• $1^$st place: 77 times
• $2^$nd place: 73 times
• $3^$rd place: 51 times
• $4^$th place: 10 times
• $5^$th place: 5 times
• $6^$th place: 3 times
• $7^$th place: 1 time

Broken down by level of achievement, here's how we fared:

• Great (almost all 1st)
  • boat
  • group 1 cookie
  • group 3 cookie
  • H
  • rand-0.2

  There doesn't seem to be an underlying theme to these cookies or the way we chose to place them. Our success here tends to come slightly more from the edge matching strategy of pairing two cookies along a common long side and trying to place that pair in an intelligent way. Our cookie submission was a puzzle piece where they could could be stacked vertically only if the placer realized they overlap if aligned correctly.

• Good (almost all 1st, 2nd, or 3rd)
  • arrow
  • dumbbell
  • group2
  • group4
  • group5
  • group6
  • group7
  • horseshoe
  • lightning
  • pacman
  • person
  • P
  • rand-0.1
  • small

  In these, selecting from the best of a variety of strategies seems to have paid off.

• Above Average (4th or better)
  • L

  This shape was too big to be paired nicely according to our pairing algorithms, so we fell back on a greedy algorithm. Since this shape is the degenerate case for a greedy algorithm (the optimal solution for one cookie closes off a lot of space that could otherwise be used for multiple cookies), we had a lot of room for improvement here.

Our player also placed in the top 3 the most number of times out of all the tournaments, a total of 201 times. Our player won first place the second most number of times. Our average rank was also second overall. Our player performed best on non-puzzle type cookies and convex cookies.