Softball simulator

[CoachPuma]

I have an 8u softball team that has lost every game by 1 run and trying to figure out an optimal lineup for the girls. Although every time I run it is says 3 days and then crashes after 1 day.

[thbrown]

Hey Coach,

Yikes, I sympathize. Assuming you are running these on the web app (https://softball.app), if the runs go too long sometimes Google Cloud Platform will shut them down. Sorry, this behavior isn't documented.

If you aren't already using it, try using the "Monte Carlo Adaptive" optimizer. It's faster and gives results that are basically just as good as "Monte Carlo Exhaustive".

If you have more than 10 players in your lineup, things slow down considerably, since there are so many possible lineups. You might be able to get away with 11 or maybe 12, but anything over that and you'll have to use the "Monte Carlo Annealing" optimizer. It's much faster, and still gives pretty good results, but it's not as thorough as the other optimizers. You can also run it multiple times and might get different answers.

The last thing you can try is adding all the players to a game and dragging them to different spots yourself. The page estimates the number of runs the lineup will score. Like so:

Thanks for using the web app and letting me know you were having issues. I'll try to get some of this information documented better.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Thomas