Puerto Rico Evolver: Improved

Puerto Rico Evolver is an Excel spreadsheet originally created by Tony Mitton for the Puerto Rico board game, designed to create advanced AI computer opponents using evolutionary algorithms. This page features a much-improved version of the spreadsheet that has been converted line-by-line into Java and included as the CPU Hard player in Tropic Euro.

Main areas of improvement include:

Massive speed improvement (around 25-30 times faster!)
New evolutionary options, including the ability to block a boat with a monopolised good
Bug fixes

Note: if you have any questions, issues or ideas for new features, please post them on the Puerto Rico Evolver forum.

This page will be continually updated over time with new versions of the spreadsheets as the AI improves. Details on future updates to these spreadsheets will be posted to the Tropic Euro news feed and to the forums.

Download 3-5 player Excel version of improved Puerto Rico Evolver (Last updated: 11th November 2014)

Download 2 player Excel version of improved Puerto Rico Evolver (Last updated: 11th November 2014)

Thank you to Ronald Meusel for converting the Excel version into ODS format (tested with LibreOffice, but may also work with Apache OpenOffice, Google Docs, and others):

Download OpenDocument Spreadsheet of 3-5 player version of improved Puerto Rico Evolver (Last updated: 24th February 2017)

Best player testers / Best players generated so far

All of the best evolved players generated so far are also available as separate spreadsheets for the various game sizes. These spreadsheets have evolution turned off and can be used to quickly test groups of players against each other to find out the best performing DNA.

Download best player tester / best players for the 3 player game (Last updated: 11th November 2014)

Download best player tester / best players for the 4 player game (Last updated: 11th November 2014)

Download best player tester / best players for the 5 player game (Last updated: 11th November 2014)

Note: Typically the top 4 or 5 players in each position are the ones currently live as the CPU Hard player in Tropic Euro. One piece of DNA from each of these pools of players for each position is chosen at random each game as required.

If you come across any players in any position that come top (tested with a decent number of total games, say 1 million or more), please email the DNA to info@tropiceuro.com. I can then add the DNA to the pool of CPU Hard live DNA in Tropic Euro, and I'll update this best player tester with your DNA and Author name (let me know if you want to remain anonymous).

Are you an Excel programmer?

I've proposed some improvements to the Puerto Rico Evolver over at the Tropic Euro forums. If you would like to help with these improvements then please email info@tropiceuro.com - I will probably get round to doing this eventually if there are no offers, but if anyone would like to help then that would be really appreciated.