Talk:RoboRumble

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RoboRumble history

April 27 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is now moved to Pulsar's machine. See /TemporaryServerUp for the RR@H settings files to use and some more details. The only difference you should note is that the flag-less bots no longer have the Jolly Roger flag. This is temporary and will be fixed soon. Huge thanks to Pulsar for carrying the burden (reponsibility-wise) a while with this. I'll sleep tighter now when I don't need to worry if my WinXP Home PC (yes, it was hosted in such an environment before!) is awake and responsive. -- PEZ

October 28 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server will be down for several hours for upgrades tomorrow (Saturday Octber 29). As a side effect this will solve the issues some people have with port 8080. --Pulsar

October 29 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is going down shortly and will be up and running again within 12hours hopefully. -- Pulsar

October 29 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is up and running. Updates are needed for RoboRumble@Home clients. -- Pulsar

February 18 2006 - The RoboRumble@Home server connection might experience some downtime the following hours as I will reorganize the firewall setup. --Pulsar

March 7 2006 - The firewall switch over has now finally been done, and everything seems to be working. Some people might experience a short delay until DNS records have been updated around the world (though they were and are set to a very short "time to live" to minimize this). RoboRumble@Home clients need to be restarted as Java by default caches DNS lookups. --Pulsar

I'm using a shared computer (MacOS) to run battles and have set the USER variable in roborumble/meleerumble.txt to David414 however when the results are uploaded that username isn't used. This wasn't a problem when I mistakenly tried to use the 1.9.5.2 client. Does anybody know what I need to patch to fix this?

Easiest fix is to add USER = YOUR_NAME to meleerumble.sh

I decide to write robocode bot on scala to learn scala.
But there're a little problem - to run battles with them, you need download scala and add some libraries to rc classpath.
It's ok for me, if only my clients will run my bot. But will whole community agree, if i publish bot, which is not runnable in usual environment?

We shouldn't have bots in the rumble that can only be run on some clients. It's not really fair, and it makes us dependent on a few (or one) clients to get complete pairings for new bots.

There have been discussions about Scala in Robocode before and I think the current state is that we can't officially support it because it requires some insecure stuff disallowed by Robocode sandbox (like Reflection). See Talk:Other JVM Languages and this robocode-developers thread. Maybe we can revisit this discussion, but we'd need input from Pavel or Fnl, and possibly some Scala guru.

I'm also interested in Scala, and it might help us attract the edgy young functional programmers of the world if Robocode supported it. So it would be cool if we could. But I don't really know the details of how to do it right.

Edgy young functional programmers, eh? I must admit I am pretty interested in Scala too and that was one of the main things keeping me from giving it a real try.

It's a pity... But i write robot on scala anyway. I will return to this question when take crown in my local tests:)

I'm also planning to write scala robot now ;) Since I write scala daily, and I was maintaining a fork of robocode featuring OpenGL, I think there must exist a solution to run scala robot without sacrificing robocode sandbox.

Would like to add India's flag and link it to the code IND in the RoboRumble/Country Flagslist. I don't have a GIF. Help appreciated.

Welcome! I've added the flag, you should be good to go!

Thank you. Much appreciated

For unknown reason, the RoboRumble ranking has lost a lot of pairings. MiniRumble and smaller seem not effected. So it will take a while for it to stabelize as there are lots of bots that are missing 1-40 pairings.

That may be caused by a design flaw of the rumble client, which I didn't verify though. If the rumble cannot read robowiki's participants list, it will load a local cache instead. However, if that cache is outdated, it may cause the rumble to loose pairings, and recovering takes much longer. But this seems not to be the case losing 40 pairings.

Another possibility may be that the rumble client got a truncated participant list due to network issues, for this case, I may modify the client to check some flag to make sure the loaded participants list is full.

Hi all, has anybody had the same issue? When I start roborumble.sh, it says "Could not load properties file: ./roborumble/roborumble.txt", and the execution stops right after initiating Iteration 0. In 1.9.3.4, everything seems to work.

I never ever experienced the same thing. And the code change from 1.9.3.4 is kept minimal that I couldn’t come up with whatever change could cause this to happen.

Anyway have you ever tried to have a clean install? Or maybe the path containing robocode contains some weird char that prevents robocode from processing (e.g. space, this bug is known)

Thanks, that actually worked. I had to run the installation instead of simply unpacking the jar.

Hi all

I've been thinking of upgrading the accepted client version. What are your thoughts on the matter? Have any of you tested extensively with the latest releases locally? Are there any changes in scores (or any changes that might affect scores) that we should do more extensive testing of first?

Finally 1.9.3.3 released, with RoboRumble battle duplicating fix, and with shorter participants list check period from 1.9.3.1 as well. It’s time to do a test and discuss to upgrade.

Question, what kind of tests should be done in local? Should we run a literumble locally and see whether it yields the same score as the main rumble? (which gives the best result but takes monthes). Or just using roborunner with a few robots (both 1v1 and melee certainly), and see their score is unaffected.

Just roborunner and a few bots should be fine. At some point it would be good to reset the meleerumble as well, since old bots get biased downwards by excessive battles against new (good) bots.

I've been always thinking about the pairing systems of meleerumble.

Once every combination of 10 bots had a run, the score is unbiased, which takes N = n! / (10! * (n - 10)!) ≈ 10^19 battles in current settings (n is the total of participants).

However we should get approximate score with feasible battles via monte carlo method. In current settings, ~10000 battles already gives a somewhat stable score (for the new participant).

Let each bot gets m battles, randomly selected from all (N / n) 10-bot combinations containing that bot, then the probability of meeting another specific bot in a battle is (N / n / (n - 1)) / (N / n) = 1 / (n - 1).

Assume that when a new bot is released, every battle contains that bot, then the probability of meeting that bot is 1 instead of 1 / (n - 1), which is highly biased.

To fix this, we have two options — mutate our current pairing systems to get unbiased score online, or to reset the entire meleerumble periodically.

Since the score of new bots are unbiased, all we need to do for an unbiased score is to ignore (n - 2) / (n - 1) biased battles randomly when calculating the score of an old bot. However this approach takes much more battles.

A more practical way is is, when bot A is added, for each battle, select another bot B randomly, and run melee battles containing those two bots as usual. A battle containing A, B and other 8 bots should yield 45 pairings, but only those matching (A, *) or (B, *) is taken into account. This produces 17 parings.

This scheme does not affect the pairings of the new bot itself at all, which is already unbiased; And for an old bot, the probability of being chosen as B is 1 / (n - 1), therefore the probability of a battle with A present being taken into account for old bots is 1 / (n - 1), the same as the unbiased one.

Your second approach seems good, it will need patches on the client side so that if a priority pairing needs to happen it only uploads the battles which contain one of the priority bots. This filter will work fine for the 1v1 rumble as well.

Why don't we wait to update the client until this can be fixed too?

The only reason for upgrading earlier is that those two bugs are very annoying when running rumble client 7/24.

And it generally takes monthes for fnl to release a new version in normal cycle ;(

Anyway, since those two fixes are unrelated to robocode engine, one should expect no performance difference if we cherry pick the fix back to 1.9.2.5.

Maybe we could release a special version of 1.9.2.5 for those running rumble 7/24, before the melee pairing fix is released.

Or, we may just ask fnl whether he could please release 1.9.3.4 soon after the meleerumble patch is applied.

I patched robocode 1.9.2.5's roborumble by cherry-picking roborumble client fixes from 1.9.3.2 and 1.9.3.3

The patched roborumble.jar can be downloaded from:

 https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=12lu8H4SlpBxOFRF5L8_koU5j7Cla5BLj

This should check participants list more often preventing retired bots from being battled and submitted nullifying smart battles. And on unstable network it won't upload 80000 duplicate battles for a single pairing any more. (See pulsar.PulsarNano 0.2.4 and ad.last.Bottom 1.0)

I suspect we should separate roborumble version and robocode version (since they are weakly dependent) and get roborumble bug fixes quicker than robocode, since roborumble bugs are generally more serious, and roborumble fixes has nothing to do with the rest of robocode users.

Currently fixes in roborumble takes almost a year to be actually deployed.

I've enabled 1.9.3.3 for uploads. Let's try it for a while and see how it goes. If we notice anything strange, well, the rumble probably needs a wipe some time soon anyway, and definitely melee.

I'll upgrade all my clients later and upload the same bot of mine with different version number to see the impact on score...

The melee part is already discussed, but why the 1v1 rumble needs a wipe as well? And how long it should take to reload the rumble? Or should we run the current rumble as a backup in parallel until the reload completes? (so that new players can still submit their bots)

Hopefully we don't need to wipe 1v1 rumble. I am more just concerned with bad configurations, running with Java10 etc that have accumulated.

Have you managed to make a patch for the melee priority battles?

The rumble clients load version number dynamically, maybe we should tweak this to append Java version after version number as well to prevent running and uploading with Java 10 incidentally.

And since we have rolling average, the accumulated effect of bad configurations should be fixed automatically (after a lot of battles).

A patch for melee priority battle is harder than I thought, as the data structure (currently, very bad, string) needs a redesign for the extra 1 bit of information. And almost every line of code needs a rewrite as it depends on the implementation details of the (not extensible) data structure.

Done! After some refactoring, the rumble client should upload only pairings containing the prioritized bot, or containing the predetermined random bot when running prioritized battles.

The only flaw is that when the rumble server returns prioritized pairings, etc. A and B, if B is not evenly distributed, then B will get biased battles (meet more A). Is literumble using this feature currently? How not evenly distributed is bot B returned in this case?

Bot B is randomly selected from missing pairs, or if pairings are complete then randomly selected, with weighting biased towards lower number of battle pairs. It should be ok (and regardless, much much better than the current situation)

Great! I’ll send the patch to fnl after some test.

Now I need some test bed on literumble, or deploy one myself.

IIRC, everyone is able to create a new rumble game on literumble by writing rumble client config?

You can do it on literumble and I will delete when you are done.

Something strange happens.

http://literumble.appspot.com/BotCompare?game=roborumble&bota=aaa.n.ScalarN%200.011d.148&botb=aaa.n.ScalarN%200.011d.145&order=-Diff%20APS

ScalarN scores APS 0% and survival 0% (it was all 100%/100% before recent 1-2 days) against some bots with APS lower than 50, after 1.9.3.3 is allowed. However I've been testing my bot with 1.9.3.2 and 1.9.3.3 since the first day and nothing strange happens.

I noticed that Anonymous uploads in http://literumble.appspot.com/RumbleStats, which is the only machine besides my servers. I'm pretty sure this strange score does not come from my servers.

Is that possible to see whether some strange pairings comes from a specific uploader?

Some time ago I accidentally set up the gigameleerumble, while it should have been named meleeTop30rumble. You can remove the gigameleerumble, all bots have around 10-20 pairings.

Honestly, I like the name gigameleerumble better ;-) Maybe we should switch to that instead?

Well, another special case is the initialization process. When every battle is a prioritized battle, should we have something special to prevent the slow down?

Another question — will literumble return prioritized pairings all the time? or will it stop after each bot gets enough battles.

Seems something is wrong, ScalarN is suddenly first in mini, micro and nano rumble ! And ofcourse second in roborumble, which in itself is quite an accomplishment.