User:Voidious

Sub-pages:

Archived Talk 20071111

Background

I'm a 29 year old Software Engineer, fledgling guitar player, Smash Bros and Quake lover, craft beer drinker, and admitted former recurring Robocode addict. I took a stab at Robocode in late 2002 just before starting my college career, but never got much past Linear Targeting and some attempts at Random Movement. I took another look in Fall of 2005, and in less than a week, I was completely hooked!

I'm currently in charge of the RoboWiki, handed the reigns by PEZ in late 2007 -- though the move to the new server took quite a while, and migration of content still continues. It's truly a whole community that keeps this site alive, though, so I just do my best to help make that possible.

Besides the RoboWiki, I exist in a few other places on the web...

• dijitari/void - Miscellaneous personal stuff, including some music and writing.
• @Voidious on Twitter

My bots

All my bots are open source. Most of them are currently under the RWPCL. Diamond is now under zlib and my future bots probably will be, too.

Active Bots

• Dookious - A duelist named after Count Dooku, using Wave Surfing and GuessFactor Targeting. He was RoboRumble General 1v1 champ for almost 2 years (April 2006 to early 2008), and now sits at #2 behind the mighty DrussGT.
• Komarious - A MiniBot duelist using Wave Surfing and GuessFactor Targeting. Former MiniBot 1v1 champ, currently at #2.
• Jen - A MicroBot duelist using Stop And Go + Random Movement and a GuessFactor gun. Around #10 in the MicroBot rankings.
• LuminariousDuo - My serious Twin Duel team, currently using GuessFactor Targeting and Minimum Risk Movement.
• BrokenSword - Born from LuminariousDuo, this is a melee MiniBot. It's around #10 in the MiniMeleeRumble rankings, but I'd love to get it into the top 5 (or 1) some day. =)
• Diamond - A melee MegaBot, and my most serious effort on the melee side of things. Uses Minimum Risk Movement and Dynamic Clustering for gun and 1v1 (Wave Surfing) movement. Entered the MeleeRumble on 5/14/2009 at #6. Currently at #1 in Melee and #3 in 1v1, this is my main bot right now.
• BlitzBat - A melee MicroBot with a simple Minimum Risk Movement.
• TripHammer - This started as a k-means clustering gun experiment, but is now home to a variety of clustering experiments and gun research tinkering.

Other or retired bots

• Shaakious - An experimental duelist, named after Shaak Ti. Used the movement from Dookious and a pretty strong (for the time) Pattern Matching gun. Retired / abandoned.
• Tyranius - A cross of the Wave Surfing movement from Dookious and the amazing targeting of Ascendant. Version 1.0 hit a rating of 2092, over 10 points ahead of Dookious at the #1 spot at the time.
• Lukious - Built from the shell of Dookious, Lukious is a duelist that uses Dynamic Clustering for data analysis in both movement and targeting. Retired after the release of Diamond.
• KomariousTeam - A Twin Duel team based on my mini surfer, Komarious. Started out as a very average team, but I left it in the tourney for the sake of variety. Then David Alves came along and tweaked it a bit, making it a very strong competitor for a while. Still a Twin Duel entrant, but I don't work on it.
• Codious - A melee / team bot (only melee was ever released), using Minimum Risk Movement and the same (but differently configured) Pattern Matching gun as Shaakious. Never found much success. Retired.

Other stuff

• Twin Duel - A 2v2, Code Size restricted survivalist competition that I once ran weekly. The tourney consists of a round robin where everyone faces each other in round robin preliminary matches to determine the seeding for a traditional, single elimination bracket tourney. This hasn't been run for a while, but it might be coming back soon.
• Segmentation Research - Some machine learning methodologies applied to finding good segmentation slices in targeting.
• BedMaker - A utility (written in Perl) for generating test beds from a set of criteria. Designed as a companion to RoboResearch.
• TripHammer/Research - A utility for testing gun classification algorithms against pre-gathered data sets outside of Robocode. Includes data collecting bots, the testing infrastructure, and source for everything.

Where did you get that handle?

Once upon a time, my handle was "Void". (If you were around at the dawn of FPS internet gaming, you might even remember me from PlanetQuake.) Actually, before that, my Quake news site was called "The Void" and people thought it was my handle, so I adopted it.

One night, around the time of Star Wars: Episode I, a group of friends and I used Star Wars riffs on our handles while gaming, as a joke. I was "Darth Voidious", and I occasionally used it as an alternate handle when gaming online. Eventually, "Voidious" stuck, and the gaming scene got far too big for "Void" to be a unique handle... So at some later point, I returned from a gaming hiatus and used "Voidious" exclusively from then on.