Hey readers! Things have been absolutely nuts here at socialbots mission control, but wanted to take a second to drop the latest update on how the competition is going. As we wrote earlier, Monday officially commenced the second round of the competition. Over the weekend, the teams had a chance to edit their bots based on their performance in Round One, and launch additional bots. Team A and C updated their code, and Team B additionally became a swarm bot (a lead bot with supporting bots).

We’re currently at the third day of Round Two — which will end on Day Seven (Sunday). The current scores as they stand are:

• Team A: 144
  
• Team B: 96
  
• Team C: 361

Both Team B and C have deployed new architectures for their bots, trying to maximize their social response from the target network and make their bots more proactive in responding to the targets. This has led to a gigantic growth in points — although Team A currently now outpaces Team C in terms of raw follow-backs (117 v. 107), we’re seeing a huge point lead start to cleave out from bots getting optimized to elicit responses (Team C currently has logged 86 responses, with Team A only with 9).

Team B’s approach to appropriate other user content in fueling interactions between bot and target has been relatively less successful, with only 9 responses racked up so far. However, optimizations to their connection building mechanism have been significantly more successful, showing a 500% increase in points against round one in the three days since the second round began.

It should also be reported that Team B’s also deployed some counter-measures with its supporting swarm against Team C, with bots attempting to erode the credibility of Team C among its followers. While this hasn’t slowed down their point growth to date, there’s still a few more days of Round Two…

As per usual — the full network graph, now color coated for more easy determination of what’s going on. We’re playing around with some more visualization to make it easier to see how much social “territory” the teams have captured.