[darklajid]

Whoa. The servers for this competion are about 8km away. That's the most 'local' content I've ever seen on HN.

Unfortunately I have to agree with obstinate here. The pure math is too much for me and reverse engineering (still daunting, but interesting/possible) is not acceptable. If any HN person wins this contest, I offer beers close to the black box :)

[pilooch]

Shameless plug: anyone interested should be able to get baseline results and above easily by using libcmaes. I am one of the authors with no time to compete, but am interested in reports on how it goes. Also if you are a researcher or a student the lib should let you experiment easily with various custom strategies.

https://github.com/beniz/libcmaes