User:Voidious

Background

I'm a 34 year old software developer, dog lover, and former Robocode addict. I took a stab at writing bots in late 2002 just before starting college, but never got much past Linear Targeting and Random Movement. I took another look in Fall of 2005, and in less than a week, I was completely hooked! Dookious emerged and took the 1v1 throne about 6 months later.

I'm currently in charge of the RoboWiki, handed the reigns by PEZ in 2007. It's truly a whole community that keeps this site alive, though, so I just do my best to help make that possible. You can probably consider me retired as a bot author since late 2012.

I'm also...

• @Voidious on Twitter
• GitHub/Voidious

BerryBots

These days I spend my time working on a new programming game I developed: BerryBots. You write bots in Lua and the app runs on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Raspberry Pi. It has some cool new stuff, like walls, torpedos, programmable stages, HTML5 replays, and a pretty snazzy automation API. You can even try it on the web.

• Play BerryBots in a browser
• BerryBots overview video
• BerryBots replay - battle1: NightShade vs SANIC
• BerryBots vs Robocode rules comparison
• Sample stages

My bots

All my bots are open source. Older ones are under RWPCL. Diamond and RetroGirl are under zlib.

Active Bots

• Dookious - My first real bot (by name, anyway), a duelist using Wave Surfing, Segmentation, Visit Count Stats, and GuessFactors. He was RoboRumble General 1v1 champ for almost 2 years (April 2006 to early 2008), but has since been bumped down to #8.
• Komarious - A MiniBot duelist using Wave Surfing and GuessFactors/VCS. Cousin of the Wave Surfing Tutorial. Former MiniBot 1v1 champ, currently at #2.
• Jen - A MicroBot duelist using Stop And Go + Random Movement and a GuessFactor/VCS gun. Just outside the top 10 of the MicroRumble.
• LuminariousDuo - My Twin Duel team, currently using GuessFactor Targeting with VCS and Minimum Risk Movement. One of the top teams and #2 in the rumble.
• BrokenSword - Born from LuminariousDuo, this is a melee MiniBot. It's around #13 in the MiniMeleeRumble rankings and needs an overhaul.
• Diamond - A melee MegaBot and my main bot right now. Uses Minimum Risk Movement, Wave Surfing, Dynamic Clustering, Shadow/Melee Gun, Displacement Vectors and GuessFactors. Currently #2 in both Melee and 1v1.
• BlitzBat - A melee MicroBot with a simple Minimum Risk Movement. Ranked #6 among Micros and #11 among Minis (yes, above BrokenSword!).
• RetroGirl - A perceptual bot with a pretty strong gun evolved by genetic algorithms with WaveSim.

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.
• TripHammer - This started as a k-means clustering gun experiment, but is now the companion bot to WaveSim and code name for some of my 1v1 gun work.

Utilities

• RoboRunner - A multi-threaded Robocode battle runner. Designed to be easier to setup and faster than RoboResearch.
• WaveSim - A utility for testing gun classification algorithms against pre-gathered data sets outside of Robocode. Includes data collecting bots, testing infrastructure, and source for everything.
• BedMaker - A Perl script for generating test beds from a set of criteria. Designed as a companion to RoboResearch, also compatible with RoboRunner.
• LocationBot - A helper bot for testing Precise Prediction code.

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.
• Innovations since 2005 - Tired of hearing so many Robocode newcomers complain that there's nothing new to be invented/discovered in the Robocode arena, I started compiling a list of notable innovations since the advent of Wave Surfing in 2005.

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.