User:Voidious

"RoboWiki Donor"

I'm a 26 year old Software Engineer, fledgling guitar player, Smash Bros expert (well, I try =)), and admitted Robocode addict. I took a stab at Robocode in late 2002 just before starting my college career, but never got much past LinearTargeting and PerpendicularMovement. I took another look in Fall of 2005, and in less than a week, I was completely hooked!

I've got some web sites, though most are not updated often and/or just out of date: (partially thanks to Robocode)

• dijitari.com - The root of a few small/fun web pages of mine. (man@machine isn't mine, though.)
• dijitari/void - Miscellaneous personal stuffs.

TEST2

My bots:

• Dookious - A duelist named after Count Dooku, using WaveSurfing and GuessFactorTargeting. He's currently at #1 in the RoboRumble general 1v1 class (since 4/18/2006).
  • Shaakious - An experimental duelist, named after Shaak Ti. Uses the movement from Dookious and a PatternMatching gun.
  • Tyranius - A cross of the WaveSurfing 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 DynamicClustering for data analysis in both movement and targeting.
• Codious - A melee / team bot (only melee released so far), using MinimumRiskMovement and the same (but differently configured) PatternMatching gun as Shaakious. Retired for now.
• Komarious - A MiniBot duelist using WaveSurfing and GuessFactorTargeting, currently at #2 in the MiniBot class, and about #25 in the general rankings.
  • KomariousTeam - A TwinDuel 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, tweaked it a bit, and now it is one of the top entrants in the TwinDuel.
• LuminariousDuo - My serious TwinDuel team, currently using GuessFactorTargeting and MinimumRiskMovement.
• BrokenSword - Born from LuminariousDuo, this is a melee MiniBot. It's around #10 in the melee MiniBot rankings, but I'd love to get it into the top 5 (or 1) some day. =)

Other stuff:

• TwinDuel - A 2v2, CodeSize restricted survivalist competition that I run weekly. The tourney consists of a round robin where everyone faces each other 1 or more times (these days, always 1) to determine the seeding for a traditional, single elimination bracket tourney, with the finals being best of 3. Originally, I just automated the round robin, but now the entire tourney is automated. Get the source code here: TwinDuelUtil_002.zip. Thanks to Albert for his RoboRumble code, which I used to learn how to do some things, and copied a little code from, as well.
• Segmentation Research - Some machine learning methodologies applied to finding good Segmentation slices in targeting.

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 remember me from PlanetQuake!) One night, I was "Darth Voidious" for a gaming session where we all played with Star Wars themed names (around the time of Episode I). Eventually, "Voidious" stuck, and the gaming scene got far too big for "Void" to be a unique handle... So after a bit of a hiatus from gaming, I got back into it a bit and used "Voidious" exclusively.

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Comments, questions, feedback:

Welcome to the robocode addiction! -- Pulsar

Man, you said it! It's good for my programming skills, though, so it's not as hard to rationalize as some of my previous addictions :) -- Voidious

I couldn't find any page for "miscellaneous discussion", is there one? Anyway, I wanted to point out this contest:
Tank Wars competition seeks smart AI programmers
It's an invite-only competition, EA Games looking for AI game programmers... You can still download the package if you want, but you can only enter the competition if you go to one of the 14 eligible universities. Man, I'd bet some of you top-notch Robocoders could own this thing. -- Voidious

Wow, I go to one of the 14 eligible universities... but I don't know C++ and the competetion is over. Other than that, boy, I bet a quick guess factor gun implementation and some nice random movement would be useful. -- Alcatraz

When will we see the new Dookius in the rumble? -- PEZ

Probably tomorrow... I'd like to rush it out and see how it ranks, but I am thinking of taking a short break from Dookious after this version, so I want to polish it a little bit first. (Plus I've released 4 versions into the RR in the last week.) There are a lot of aspects of Robocode that I haven't really explored much, and I would really like to toy with some various ideas soon. I doubt I'll be able to stay away from Dookious for too long, though... -- Voidious

Too bad. Just throw it out and while waiting for a rating on it tidy up and polish it some. I'm curious! -- PEZ

Well, OK, if you say so ;) I'm heading home now, I'll post it within the next 30 mins or so. -- Voidious

I posted version 0.69, since the next release was going to be 0.70. It skips a lot of turns when I have CPU constant set to 1, something I was going to work on before 0.70, but I have my RR client set to 100 now, anyway. (It didn't take much of a performance hit when set to 1, anyway.) -- Voidious

Wow, the air really is thin up there! I thought 0.70 would crack 2,000, but it's looking like it won't. Maybe I'll release *one more* version before taking that break from Dookious... ;) -- Voidious

A belated congratulations on 2000, by the way. Florent was the only person to break the barrier in 2005. You've kicked 2006 off to a great start! --Corbos

Thanks! I was extremely excited about that. I was workin' on Dookious a *lot* for several weeks before that, and now I'm really enjoying taking a break from him to try some other stuff... -- Voidious

I spent much of yesterday tinkering with my first team, and got it to a very basic functional state. What a pain in the neck! That might be the last chance I ever give to AntiGravityMovement - it's generally so simple that it seems like a promising idea, but I feel like I have zero control over my tanks when using it. I will probably try some MinimumRiskMovement and/or some MultiMode strategy ideas next. Pain in the neck or not, it seems like a lot of fun! -- Voidious

My attempts went from '5 Ugluks' to '5 Ugluks that didn't shoot each other' to '5 rambots that focused on one target at a time determined by the most senior bot alive in a chain of command' but that was a colossal failure due to the friendly fire that ensued. I spent about two days working on it around Thanksgiving and a few weeks ago I removed the last of the related code. -- Martin

Hehe, sounds a bit like my development process so far. Of course, you have a working melee bot, so you probably have a much better grasp of strategies with that many tanks on the field. Right now I'm happy to get over 33% of total score against any of the teams rated around 1600. -- Voidious

It helps a lot if you have any melee-experience, even if it is just about how to handle the radar. Note that radar only has a 1200 scanrange. Most teams just are 5 meleebots put together, which leaves the door open for some 'real' strategy. Troodon is a very simple and successfull melee and teambot and one of the few that makes use of droids, I lent its way of communication for GrubbmGroup. My tip is to start with a simple gun and concentrate on movement. And watch your battles, it gives much more info about what goes right and wrong than the results can tell. -- GrubbmGait

Whoah, I thought I was at the wrong site for a moment when I saw this headline: Cyanide Launches Loki Web Site ... =) -- Voidious

• It's not my kind of game, but at least the name sounds good. --Loki

A no. 1 rating at 486 battles and a positive momentum: will Dookious be the new top-bot and Voidious the new king? Stay tuned!

Anyhow, congratulations with your steady improvement on this strong bot. And i noticed you also entered the melee arena! So we will have to fear your presence there as well... --Loki

Thanks, Loki! I'm quite pleased with the latest rating, and I'll enjoy my time at the #1 spot, but the official crown certainly still belongs to Ascendant, since I'm sure his best version would outrank Dookious by a good 10 points.

• hehe, you wrote "I'm quite pleased with the latest rating" but i bet you are walking around with a permanent ear-to-ear grin on your face!!! And its earned! (reading this it's almost as if the British flag in front of Dookious is better suited ;) ) --Loki
• Ha, that comment made me laugh =) I guess "pleased" might be a slight understatement ;) There's a margin of error on anything I post about before lunch... -- Voidious

And it might be a while before it's worth fearing me in the melee arena. That fear is probably better placed upon Florent at the moment. But I'll keep working at it... =)

-- Voidious

My sincere congratulations to you! Real 1st place at RoboRumble. I can only hope, that one day my bot will enter first ten at least. -- DemetriX

Wow. I turn my back for a second and you take the #1 space - a very sincere congratulations! I look forward to seeing what kind of hornets nest you stirred up there. Well done. --Corbos

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I started using Darcs, a free revision control system that runs on Windows, this week. Spoiled by large amounts of disk space, sometimes I'll just make a copy of my whole Dookious code directory when I want to preserve something, but I do know just how "wrong" that is. I finally put in the effort to find a CVS-type system that I can use on Windows, and Darcs is working very well for me so far; it's definitely worth checking out if you're looking for one. I wouldn't mind hearing what other people use, if anything. (I'd guess some of the Unix-lovers use CVS, which I've used but have never setup myself.) -- Voidious

• Gah, I had seen the VersionControl page, but just found the CVS page. Maybe I'll give that TortoiseCVS a try... -- Voidious
• I've been using Subversion happily for a little while, and there is a plugin for Eclipse which makes it so easy to commit new versions. -- Alcatraz
• I have been using CVSNT since I started X2 along with CVS plugin for Eclipse. It saved me few times. -- Florent
• I use nothing :o Almost all my bots are using only one sourcefile. (and I also use Kawigi's built-in editor) -- GrubbmGait

I e-mailed PEZ right when this started, about 1.5 hours ago, just so you guys know. I hope he shows up sometime soon, but if not, it seems very likely to me that he (or I, if he wants me to) could write a script to revert the vandalised pages, and I don't doubt he could come up with some way of filtering out the SPAM edits in the future. I wish I had the time to keep helping with the reversions, but I have a research paper to work on, unforuntately. :( -- Voidious

Sorry for the rudeness but... HOLY FRICKIN CRAP! Whoever did this(and their bot) should be shot in the testicles! -- Xero

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Well, I picked up a MacBook (white, 2 GHz) today, and I am loving it so far. I've only got 512 RAM right now, and I'm going to upgrade to 2 gigs on my own since Apple would charge $450 for that upgrade (sheesh!). I haven't collected hard numbers on how it compares to my AMD2000 Windows machine in Robocode speed just yet, but it seems to be noticeably a bit faster (as I would hope). Also, this machine is still completely usable even when running an intensive benchmark; and I was able to run 2 separate Robocode matches at the same time with seemingly no slowdown. I haven't found anything to let me manually assign a process to a specific core on a Mac, but if anyone knows how, feel free to let me know.

Of course, even if the speed of Robocode were just not worse than my AMD machine, I would still be very happy to be using Mac OS X instead of Windows =) So I am quite a happy camper right now. I hope you other Americans are having a good holiday weekend!

-- Voidious

Have fun with the new machine. =)

Hey, I remember reading somewhere that you changed your RR@H client to fail quickly if the repository was unavailable. Could you send me the class files for that version? My contact information is on ContactInfo. --David Alves

I sent you my version (which should be the same as Voidious'). This version will never download a bot from the repository, if it is available or not. This means that I download a bot manually if necessary and put it in the 'robots' directory. -- GrubbmGait

Ah, beat me to it! :) Anyway, I posted my .class files for that version online, too: roborumble_norepository.zip. It's just replacing the part after the "if" in line 205 of netengine/BotsDownload.java with "return false", instead of formulating the robocoderepository.com URL based on the id number. -- Voidious

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Snipped that discussion over to TwinDuel/2v2CompetitionIdea. -- Voidious

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I'm taking a machine learning course at school this semester, and one of the books we are using for the class is available for free online, with the stipulation that you don't print it. (It's also sold as a "real" book by a publisher.) It assumes some familiarity with some high-ish level math, but I figure some of you might find it interesting: David MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms -- Voidious

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Thanks for running those TC battles; though, please don't feel obligated to make up for my laziness. ;) I'm running a few MC rounds to make up for it... - just hard to balance everything with robots, family, work, and my hand modeling career. Cheers. --Corbos

Don't worry, I feel no obligation =), I was just curious to see the scores on your latest release. It looks like Chalk is a strong contender for the most accurate DC gun out there - very impressive. And besides, it's always nice to flex my MacBook's Core Duo muscle during lectures ;) -- Voidious

Shadow's got nothing to fear for a while. I've noticed (regretfully) that most of my improvement is against the more simple bots. My PL scores remain wanting. Still, my robofire is refueled. I've got a couple more ideas before I go dormant. What's the class schedule like this semester? Don't you have a couple theater credits left so you could go easy on us for a while? --Corbos

Well, only one specific class "required" for my degree (it's my last semester), so I get to take my other classes as pass/fail, which is nice. However, like the dork I am, one of those "electives" is a Senior / Grad level Machine Learning course. On the one hand, it might consume my time so that I have less for Robocode; but on the other hand, it's possible I'll learn something that will help in my Robocoding. =) We're soon looking at k-means clustering. -- Voidious

Growing a little frustrated by my recent work on BrokenSword, I turn back to an ancient problem that I've never quite solved: hitting Shadow. =) -- Voidious

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By the way, have you finisced your NaNoWriMo? I enjoyed the beginning and would like to read the whole story! --Krabb

Hey, I saw your comment, I appreciate that =) Unfortunately, with everything else I had going on in November, I failed miserably to finish my story again this year. But I was really enjoying it, so maybe I'll pick it up again even though I missed the Nanowrimo deadline. Thanks for checking it out, man ;) -- Voidious

Well, it's about time I post the reason for my recent hiatus: I've spent the last month or so moving to / starting my new job. I should be at least a little more active again in the next week or two, but we'll just have to see what happens. There are still some more pressing concerns, like adding to my miniscule quantity of furniture. =)

I'm certainly still reading the wiki regularly. I know I missed the TwinDuel this past week (without notice, too, sorry), but I'll get it going again this week, for sure. Maybe I'll even find time to try and improve LuminariousDuo in time or work on that TargetingChallenge2K7 score.

-- Voidious

Hey Voidious i was wondering if you knew how to setup a robot project in xcode so that xcode will compile the bot and copy the class files back to the robots directory in Robocode after a build. Thanks!! -- Gorded

Sorry man, I really don't know. I haven't played with XCode all that much yet, though it's always on my list of things to do. I just use Eclipse for Robocode. -- Voidious

Hey, who was that from rpi.edu that just edited / reverted the main page? That's only about an hour away from me and I know a couple people who go there. Just curious. =) If it's someone new and you'll be hanging around, feel free to make a page for yourself and your bots. -- Voidious