Talk:RoboRumble

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

Subpages

Should we replace ALL of the subpages? or just the 'important' ones? -- Starrynte 22:16, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Name

Since the new wiki supports symbols in page names, should we put this page at RoboRumble@Home instead of RoboRumble? We already have a redirect from that page to this one... --AaronR 23:34, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

RR seems to be down

Roborumble is returning 503 Unavailable for all pages today. Not sure why. -- Synapse 03:07, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure? Both rumble.fervir.com and ABC's work for me. -- KetsuNfwu 03:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I fail. I meant Robocode Repository. -- Synapse 05:44, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Not a big surprise there. =P -- KetsuNfwu 13:21, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi! What the heck happened to RR@H again? The main roborumble has only ~60 bots again... Otherwise, I uploaded Pugio 1.2 1 week ago and has only 120 battles in nanoRumble. Situation is the same in Darcanuck's page, too. Nobody is contributing?--HUNRobar 12:30, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Both ABC's server and DarkCanuck's server have no full pairings yet. Once the megabots have full pairings, the minirumble will get filled completely and as last the micro- and nano-rumble. Be patient, but it probably requires a few weeks before all nanobots have 1000 battles. Remember, 640 * 640 bots means a lot of battles! Pulsar's server has another issue. I don't know what happened, but I still run (repair)battles there. --GrubbmGait 13:14, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I realised that in Darcanuck's server the older versions of bots are still in game. I think the competitors there should be cleaned up. For example, I don't want to generate battles for Pugio 1.0 when I wait for the results of 1.2. --HUNRobar 14:57, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

That's a temporary thing -- I'm uploading a huge amount of data from ABC's server which includes old participants. There's a big performance hit to activating/retiring participants repeatedly, so for now everyone's in the rankings until I get caught up. But don't worry, no rumble clients will actually run these bots. They'll use only the version from the participants list. In a few days you should see the old bots disappear from the rankings. --Darkcanuck 15:03, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoops edit conflict, accidentally overwrote Darkcanuck's reply with this: "What versions get battles doesn't depend on the server, it depends on the participants list that clients are configured to (which should be the old wiki's one, the one here has not been synced for a long time). The server would have nothing to do with that so you shouldn't be generating battles for Pugio 1.0 unless your client is misconfigured I believe." Anyways Darkcanuck's reply clearly explains why there are currently old versions listed :) --Rednaxela 15:10, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks but I'm very excited about the results of Pugio 1.2. :)

Lynch the Multi-Threaders!

A thought just occurred to me. I have never liked the fact that robots could be threaded. Why?

1. On a single-core (non-hyperthreaded) machine it cannot help the bot without hurting the opponent. Either a) all computation is done on one CPU during your turn, in which case you could have done the same computation with less overhead without the threads, or b) you do computation past your turn, eating up CPU cycles from your opponent.
2. On a multi-core (or hyperthreaded) machine, it violates the idea that all bots are equal except for their AI. You suddenly get 2 CPU's in your robot, essentially.

This is a reality we have had to live with, because that's the way robocode is designed. HOWEVER - it just occurred to me that we could enforce a rule saying that no multi-threaded bot is allowed in the rumble! Which I hereby propose. Besides being unfair to the bot's opponent, acting like a virus stealing CPU, it steals CPU from bots in OTHER battles now-a-days when more than one rumble client executes at a time on multi-core machines! Any bot caught using multiple threads would be immediately removed from the rumble. Does anybody agree? --Simonton 02:47, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. It isn't fair on the opposition, and makes it impossible to design a bot within the CPU-constant constraints. --Skilgannon 10:34, 23 September 2008 (UTC)