User talk:Wolfman

Just added a very early version of my new robot to the roborumble, just to get a baseline. Its dead simple though its mega bot because its extensible and flexible framework to build on.

If I've got anything wrong setting up the bot on the roborumble participants page can someone tell me so I can fix it! Ta!

Hiya,

Getting back into this (again!) Had a few questions on bot size.

Couldn't find the info anywhere through the search so apologies if this has been answered else where but what is the bot size?

Obviously the getWidth and getHeight functions return 36, but is this the full width from one edge to the other, or is this from the centre to the edge?

Also is the hit box of the robot axis aligned or object aligned? I.e as the bot rotates does the bounding box rotate meaning the maximum width of the robot is in fact sqrt((36*36)+(36*36)) = ~50.91?

Or ... is the collision detection of bullets etc a simple radius check?

Lastly some of the examples on pages hardcode the width of the bot to 16 pixels - obviously incorrect - see the http://robowiki.net/wiki/Linear_Targeting page, the section Exact Non-Iterative Solution defines the robot width as 16 ... and then proceeds to divide the width by two which seems doubly incorrect?

Cheers!

The bot is 36x36 and doesn't rotate, always axis-aligned. The 50.91 sounds right (and I remember 25.xx as the max half width). Last point of note is that each tick, bullets advance, then Robocode checks for collisions, then bots move.

Not sure about the 16 - I'd guess some Minibot-ism at play.

Yeah at a perfect 45 degree angle from the AABB, it would have a width of <math>18\sqrt{2}</math>.

Ok great, cheers! Using 18 for checking distance to wall and ~26 for checking overlap of things like wave bullets etc! :)

So I fixed several bugs I found in AgentSmith when I added a load of debug output to my bot ... and I discovered my TCRM score reduced by 2% over 30 seasons. Sigh. Do you prefer bug free robots or higher scores? :)

We had an extensive discussion about this at one point. In the end I think most of us felt a bug free robot was better then a slightly better scoring buggy robot. Since it made it easier to improve its score later, etc.

I think Voidious mentioned he figured out why the bug caused a score improvement and reintegrated it into the robot in a controlled way.

I think you have what are called Performance Enhancing Bugs.

Basically, if you care about the short-term performance of AgentSmith, leave it in. But, it's usually better in the long run, especially this early in development, to keep it as bug-free as you can.

What I do is try to figure out what effect the bug was having, and understand why it caused better results. Then I try to add that effect back in a 'legitimate' way.

An example is when I gained score by removing the variable-bot-width, which accounted for the extra area the bot covers in a wave if it is moving while the wave crosses. I later added in precise-intersection code, which gained me more score, despite (theoretically) doing roughly the same thing as what had cost me score previously. I chalked it down to my previous method not being accurate enough.

If this was a bug in a GF gun that helped you only against wave-surfers, I'm not particularly surprised. After all, you were using something that they weren't designed to dodge.

No it was several things and im only working on the random movement bots at the moment as wave surfers are a whole different thing.

What I fixed was:

• My waves were 1 tick behind the bullet
• Setting the gun angle was 1 tick behind the angle calculation rather than using the latest calculation
• My automatic weighting was not taking into account the target bots rotation direction.

Make of that what you will! I'm going to keep the fixes in - as you say it should make improvements in the future easier. Although im currently struggling to find any improvements in the gun at the moment and its way off the leaders TCRM scores. :(

I guess im too much of a critic and want to be up at the top right away. Or at least better than average.

Interesting point about the bot size. I'm using the Math.atan(18/distance) * 2 to get the width of the bot. Hrm!

That first one is pretty normal, I do that in my bots because of the physics involved:

1. the bullet moves
2. collisions are tested
3. the bot moves
4. we see where everything is.

So our wave should be a tick ahead of the bullet because when the collisions happen that's where the bullet is. You could also do it by having the enemy back one tick.

I found there was some gain in calculating precise, simulated GF-1 and GF1 instead of just using asin(8/bVel), so that I never shoot outside of where the enemy could be given the setup of the situation, eg walls, heading is not perpendicular, etc. Also, to do a better representation of the bot-size as the wave passes over, check out Waves/Precise Intersection.

Welcome back dude! :-) You might find User:Voidious/History/Innovations since 2005 an interesting recap of some of the biggest advancements of the last few years. For all the talk of "no breakthroughs since Wave Surfing", bots have continued to get a heck of a lot stronger. DrussGT may excel in crushing the weak, but he's just as scary head to head.

Good luck with AgentSmith!

Thanks chap! :) Will see how I get on this time!