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On January 27 2010 11:04 ix wrote:
Nope, make a map and test it. Central mineral patch, 1 extra matrix away from the natural and you will see little gaps between the workers' mining. This is a better patch than the diagonal ones which have larger gaps as they are further away which seems to lose about 1 second of mining time every 2 times it's mined as the 2nd probe is still travelling.
Ok. now we're getting somewhere. But does that mean that you need 3 for max efficiency on that patch? Do you ever have 2 sitting there, for any period of time, when it could be mining somewhere else instead?
You can definitely micro 5 probes to gather from 2 patches which are not ideal, provided that they are close enough to eachother. And, on most mineral patches, that is normal.
There's a more obvious and undebateable way of proving you're wrong. Measure the mining rate of 1 patch, put infinite workers on it and measure over 5 mins say, tell me what value you get. Now measure the rate of 9 workers on 9 patches on a normal spawn like Python. See, the number is less than half the rate suggested by 9 times the maxed out single patch. Therefore it is not possible to max out the minerals with patches times 2 workers
However, are you taking into consideration that, when there are more than 1 per patch, that they could actually be used to mine more than a single patch?
There is a lot going on..... Simplifying it down to "ooh, 2 miners must work on this single patch" is such a narrow view, when we're talking about the ideal way of doing it. And, even if you can't get 100% efficiency from 18 workers, but you can get 99.8%, isn't that good enough, since the extra 50 minerals wouldn't even generate a significant change?
Seriously, this stuff is useful for the AI competitions, but that's about it.....
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can u all take this to PM or get a room?
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On January 27 2010 11:12 Bill Murray wrote:
can u all take this to PM or get a room?
Actually, I'm leaving at this point anyways. If he doesn't want to listen to the conventional wisdom, as well as listen to the work done by dozens of other people before him, that's fine by me.
And, if I ever face him, and he spends those extra few seconds counting his probes, I'll make him pay for this distraction. It's not really that applicable in a real-game situation. You don't start with 27 probes, you start with 4, and work your way up, likely having less than 27 at your main, and 24 at your natural until 10 minutes into the game.
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My point is about what is achievable, the 24/25 number is something that may remain stable without intervention, you are talking about what an AI with constant intervention can do. I repeatedly said the conventional wisdom (22 workers for 9 patches) seems to be correct if you can't remove wander. I am looking at dealing with wandering and how it behaves, has someone else investigated this? If so link. There are a number of real game issues that this is useful for and I'll write a post to talk about some of it.
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People may have not looked directly at wandering, but any time mining rates are tested, wandering is part of it. And, in an achievable situation, it is one of the many variables involved. Through testing, as well as some interesting mathematical manipulation, a result of about 25 workers/9 mineral patches has been determined to give the best "bang for the buck", while being slightly above or slightly below is acceptable.
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Can you link that? I've only seen CDRDude's and a couple of others but not what you're talking about.
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On January 27 2010 13:30 ix wrote:
Can you link that? I've only seen CDRDude's and a couple of others but not what you're talking about.
Even better:
This is really, really good stuff.
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BTW I just tested 25 probes on Python 12 and get 1096 per min, which is a lot lower than what 27 can achieve. What numbers do you get for 25 and 27 unstable and stable?
Hmm, interesting PDF. I will test some of that, it's certain to me that 2 is only optimal for a very few mineral patches. His numbers also seem a little off, or perhaps miss out hidden timing costs such as a frame to begin mining. I note that his 9 patch max mining number is the same as mine.
Map Patches Workers for Max Workers per patch
Luna 9 27 3
He gives the time cost of mining as 5.33t which must be incorrect, it gives a number far higher than my long 1 patch testing, than any of my tests, even errors.
60 / (5.33t * (15/24.8)) = 18.6116323 mineral loads per minute
18.6116323 * 8 = 148.89 minerals per min per patch
9 patches = 1,340 minerals per min
The second part of the divisor is the Normal framerate divided by the Fastest framerate to get how long in Fastest mining takes according to this. It's best IMO to do everything in terms of Fastest with seconds being real seconds (I think this is what APMLive's timer uses). A good alternative might, especially if someone can access any of the code or decompile parts would be to talk in terms of frames as you should by definition be able to talk in integers. His value would seem to suggest mining takes 80 frames, my numbers seem to suggest about 84 frames to mine or there is additional wasted time. The mineral count seems higher than anything I can do with no apparent wandering, there must wasted frames to begin mining or something. This also disagrees with his percentages of mining I think,
His optimal probe gathering rate is 56% of max from one patch. That's a single probe earning 83.38 minerals per min. That sounds insanely high, I've never seen a single probe do anything beyond 72/min, can you find a patch that performs that well? Have I made a mistake somewhere here?
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Just testing on a single mineral setup means little, especially if building placement, and addon placement haven't been considered as well. A building on one side of the map can modify the pathing of workers on the other side of the map..... I've seen it happen..... Even then, a nexus, a cc, and a hatchery all have a different shape, which affects how the workers behave. The workers are also a different size, and have different lengths of time for their animations, which affects it as well.
2 workers on a single patch is slightly less than twice the mineral return rate of a single miner, if it is on a good patch, with a good pathing between the patch and the cc/nexus/hatchery. 2 workers on a bad patch, with bad pathing between the patch and the cc/nexus/hatchery is just barely not enough. But that doesn't mean that 3 is still what is needed to mine that single patch at peak efficiency.....
I dunno what, exactly, you are doing, and I don't know exactly what he did, however, I know from personal testing that mid 20's appeared to be the best. Higher did get rid of wandering, helping to increase the mining rate, but the most efficient rates were when there were less workers. The problem is, when considering a game situation, if I know that I want to get mid 20's at both my main, and natural, I'll be in a nearly ideal situation. Also, a lot of other factors aren't considered - the linearity of vespene mining, the extra harassment opportunities due to having multiple bases, the ability to replenish workers faster by having more expansions, the supply cap, etc.
When taken as a whole, it matters little whether I have 24 or 27 workers at my main. As long as I am somewhere around there, I'll be fine. And, until I get to the pro level, where this stuff matters a lot, and build orders are designed to produce a specific number of workers at each base, I'll just keep making them as needed, until I have enough.
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On January 08 2010 05:09 Xeofreestyler wrote:
The question now is: can BW API be used to lower the optimal number ?
It actually shouldn't be too hard to do if you assign a few workers to a few mineral patches each and prevent them from mining from other patches ("spam" harvest if the min block is currently being harvested). You can easily get 100% mining rate if you only have 4 or 5 workers (depends on distance) on 2 adjacent mineral blocks. You might get short timespans where a worker is "idle", but that is less detrimental than traveling to a min block further away (except for very VERY rare cases).
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i thought you were leaving earlier what happened to that
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On January 28 2010 00:58 spinesheath wrote:Show nested quote +On January 08 2010 05:09 Xeofreestyler wrote:
The question now is: can BW API be used to lower the optimal number ? It actually shouldn't be too hard to do if you assign a few workers to a few mineral patches each and prevent them from mining from other patches ("spam" harvest if the min block is currently being harvested). You can easily get 100% mining rate if you only have 4 or 5 workers (depends on distance) on 2 adjacent mineral blocks. You might get short timespans where a worker is "idle", but that is less detrimental than traveling to a min block further away (except for very VERY rare cases).
No, it shouldn't be too difficult, which is why I'm thinking that 21 is the maximum you'd need to completely saturate 9 patches (or, at least, be very, very close to completely saturated) in any traditional setup. In fact, I would be surprised if nobody has made a script for this already..... It would lead to faster mining in the early stages of the games, allowing tech/units to be produced quicker, plus it would be cheaper to get the same return in the long term.
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Just testing on a single mineral setup means little, especially if building placement, and addon placement haven't been considered as well. A building on one side of the map can modify the pathing of workers on the other side of the map..... I've seen it happen..... Got a replay of that? That sounds extremely unlikely that anything beyond the Probe's sight range will change their pathing.
We need to get an AI guy involved in these ideas, I think your AI optimal mining idea is very interesting and would dramatically change builds. Macro may be being overlooked by AI coders as something to abuse.
The relevance of testing the mineral rate of a single patch is that it tells you the maximum mineral production of nine patches, once you know the maximum theoretical production then you can go forward with figuring out how to get it. Pathing, aside from wander doesn't matter because you, at 3 per patch have saturated sufficiently to make it mostly irrelevant unless you do something very silly with buildings.
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WOW! Thanks for your contributions... I am speechless at your dedication to this topic on efficient mining. This proves that even a simple concept in an 'old-school' (but fun) video game can involve some deep thinking and rigors in areas of mathematics and economics.
I guess this whole thing about efficient mining could probably be just an accident for the creators of the game, or they're just geniuses who had created the game with that concept in mind already.
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On January 28 2010 08:23 ix wrote:Show nested quote +Just testing on a single mineral setup means little, especially if building placement, and addon placement haven't been considered as well. A building on one side of the map can modify the pathing of workers on the other side of the map..... I've seen it happen..... Got a replay of that?
LOL. I wish I saw this 2 weeks ago, before my computer fucked up and needed to be restored :S
I had a couple of replays where that type of thing occured.
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But what about Drones? Show the Zerg players some love 
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Can never have too many drones.
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imo 70-75 workers is probably max. any more than that significantly caps the size of your army
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EPT
