funny "Robocode has peaked" quote

Was just reading oldwiki:RobocodeNG/Archive and came across this choice quote from Albert.

Robocode as it is has reached its maximum. It was more than a year ago that the las truly new idea came (ie. WaveSurfing) and now its all tweaking and optimizing... really boring.

Not sure the date, I think 2005ish. =) And here we are, 7-8 years later, still reaching new heights with our bots. No more paradigm shifting breakthroughs, true, but tons of refinements, many small to medium improvements, and a few pretty big ones along the way. To me, it seems like Wave Surfing was more the beginning of something than an end to Robocode innovation. I think we've taken a more precise and mathemetically sound approach to all aspects of our bots since then.

Since then we've had:

1. Precise Intersection
2. Precise min/max GFs
3. Bullet Shadows
4. Kd-trees (and with them, fast log-based targeting)
5. Super-survivalist bullet powers
6. Gunheat waves
7. Genetic tuning of variables
8. Shoot-everybody melee gun
9. Melee surfing

A lot of these ideas were dependant on wave surfing to begin with, I agree a little with Albert's quote, but it was a bit like saying that now that the transistor (or vacuum tube) was developed, suddenly hardware design was over. I would say no, it has only just begun =) Once we had wave surfing, the same ideas and stats which we used for gun we could adapt for movement, although the lower quantities of data posed a whole new set of problems. I would argue that before wave surfing, the tweaking of movement profiles was much more boring than what we are doing now (although definitely had a lower barrier to entry).

K-nearest neighbours/kd-trees and genetic tuning in particular are bleeding edge AI techniques that come from outside the Robocode world.

New in terms of statistics, I guess. I'm referencing papers for my MSc from the early '90s which were using kD-Trees to speed up KNN search.

Yeah, very well put. At this point, "Wave Surfing" feels to me like a very broad term that would be applied to any intelligent movement system, while there are still so many differentiating details beyond that. I mean, looking at any popular game or sport, most are long past the stages where earth shattering insights can be discovered about game play, but that doesn't mean they are immediately uninteresting. Michael Jordan didn't really do anything new, besides just doing everything better than everyone ever. And he's a pretty exciting chapter in basketball history, if you ask me. =)

Sort of on topic, as I've been working on a new game recently and designing rules, I've been thinking a lot about Robocode's rule set and how much of the game play depth is by luck or by design. It's pretty insane and impressive that the game has held up so well for so long. I try to give credit where it's due and believe it's by design. But then I think about how the scoring had to be changed after release because Mat didn't realize that a non-shooting bot might have the best survival strategy. And how simple the sample bots are, or even the earliest public bots - it's like nobody had any idea where things were going. But maybe if you have some good grasp of game play mechanics at a fundamental level, you don't have to be able to see where things are going to know that you have something with balance and depth. Or maybe Robocode isn't really all that deep compared to what could be, but it's the best we have in a really cool genre and succeeds for lots of other reasons too.

Robocode is NP-complete as most games with depth. Other games might include chess, go and poker.

But Robocode is more than simply a complex game. Having tanks and bullets as theme makes it a lot more fun. There is an intuitive feel about how a tank should behave. Moving and aiming efficiently is simply not enough, robocoders like to make theirs bots move smoothly or turn their guns without shaking.

The engine being open to everyone, with anyone being able to develop a bot (not necessarily competitive) and also being able to upload them in an open internet environment removes most barriers to entry. And being an AI competition ensures there is always someone to compete against. A great deal of Robocode longevity can be credited to RoboRumble.