Twin Duel

Sub-pages:

Participants - Results - Strategy Guide - Tourney Runner - Origin Discussion - Archived Talk 20090807

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A 2v2 teams, limited Code Size competition that began in mid-2006 as a weekly tournament. It was integrated into the RoboRumble in 2009. This format has an interesting mix of 1v1 and melee strategy, and even ramming can be used effectively.

Rules

• Competitors will be 2-bot teams on an 800x800 field.
• Code Size of teams must be under 2000 code bytes. This is measured by running the code size utility on the team's .jar file. This can mean two instances of one bot that is under 2000, or two bots that total under 2000, including shared code.
• No writing to or reading from files is allowed.
• Battles will be 75 rounds, with the winner being the team with the highest APS.

A brief history

For a more complete history, view the Origin Discussion, the Archived Talk 20090807, the discussions attached to past results, the page on the old wiki, and the current talk page.

The idea for a new weekly competition began with a discussion among active Robocoders in 2006, inspired by the long-defunct MiniBot Challenge. One of the goals was to create a format that would demand new strategies that hadn't been explored before; another goal was to force participants to create new bots instead of simply adapting existing ones. After some discussion, a survivalist ruleset was agreed upon, where competitors would be ranked by survival firsts. Starting on August 3, 2006, Voidious ran the competition every Thursday with a custom tourney runner.

The styles of the first teams varied greatly, including adaptations of 1v1 bots, adaptations of melee bots, and original teams. There were 6 teams the first week; GruwelTwins by GrubbmGait, a modified version of the melee bot Gruwel, completely dominated, going undefeated and winning over 90% of its rounds. The second week had 5 new teams (11 total); Kev's new GeminiTeam, with an aggressive 1v1 style movement, proved very strong and took the crown. The title changed hands many times through the end of 2006, including a 3-week streak for the Wave Surfing, wiki packaged KomariousTeam, and a 6-week streak for the melee/hybrid style LuminariousDuo by Voidious.

Kawigi returned to Robocode to introduce MarioBros in January 2007, which proceeded to dominate the Twin Duel for many months. Similar to LuminariousDuo, MarioBros used a hybrid movement, combining a "Raiko-style" 1v1 Random Movement and a Minimum Risk Movement. While MarioBros did not win 100% of its matches against every team, it came very close to it. By summer of 2007, activity had slowed down, and the tourney was not run for several months.

The Twin Duel resumed in the fall. After several more MarioBros wins, its dominance finally ended with an update to LuminariousDuo. LuminariousDuo won the majority of weeks through January 2008 (the rest going to MarioBros), when Kev returned to action with an update to GeminiTeam, which once again dominated the entire field. GeminiTeam won until Skilgannon's NightAndDay squeaked out an improbable victory in late February.

In March, Rednaxela's LunarTwins showed up, utilizing an all-new strategy that nobody else had tried and that few teams were prepared for. With an ultra-aggressive close-range/gang-up style of movement and a well-utilized Droid, LunarTwins made quick work of every team in the competition. An update to GeminiTeam the following week allowed it to resume its throne, but only by a very small margin. Only one more Twin Duel was run before a very long hiatus, and an updated LunarTwins took home the crown. But the matchup between GeminiTeam and LunarTwins was left close to even.

One year later, in August 2009, the Twin Duel was made part of the RoboRumble. Its custom participants list, scoring rules, tournament runner, etc. were modified or abandoned to conform to rumble standards. Its 2-bot limit, ban on file access, and code size restrictions were no longer enforced by the game; instead, the community relied on the honor system to prevent cheating. The results appeared on Darkcanuck's server, and were preserved in the standard rumble archives. On July 13, 2011, Fnl added the Twin Duel rumble configuration files to a standard Robocode installation.

Since 2009, not much has happened. Eight bots have been added to the competition, but neither of them were able to dethrone the top bots. The community switched over to Skilgannon's LiteRumble server (and the special "sort by survival" Twin Duel setting was lost somewhere along the way), but the ranking tables look almost the same. LunarTwins is still first, and GeminiTeam is second, just like in 2010. There has been stagnation in the upper ranks for almost a decade by now. Hopefully, you can change that.

See also

• Teams
• MiniBot Challenge
• Hat League