Difference between revisions of "PricklyPear"

Latest revision as of 15:45, 2 May 2020

PriclyPear
Author(s)	CrazyBassoonist
Extends	AdvancedRobot
Targeting	GuessFactor Targeting/State Matching/Virtual Guns
Movement	Wave Surfing
Download

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?: http://robocode-archive.strangeautomata.com/robots/oog.PricklyPear_1.0.6.jar

How does it move?: PricklyPear uses a slightly more polished version of AlphaDragon's surfing. It still goes with the strategy of selecting an angle instead of a direction to move at (which can make it interesting to watch), but it uses a VCS implementation of it without rolling. I put a lot of effort into strategy with this bot, so it has lots of useful features such as updating surfing data on BulletHitBullet events and ramming when the enemy is out of energy. However, what I really need to do is update the surfing itself which is fairly basic.

How does it fire?: PricklyPear uses twenty different buffers of three virtual guns, each of which has a different rolling speed and is ranked on the hit percentage using separate virtual guns. The idea behind this was that while PricklyPear does not have any guns designed to hit adaptive movement, it should be able to find a buffer that rolls at the same speed the enemy is adapting. The problem with this is that the third gun (V-Gun array of simple targeters) is very easy to dodge, and the GF gun and state matcher are a little too similar. All of the guns could probably do with a greater variety of segments.

It's three virtual guns are:

1: A very simple GF gun that segments on lateral velocity and distance. It does not roll stats at all or have a time segment, making it work best against random movement.
2: A Magic-esque state matcher segmented on lateral velocity, distance, and time.
3: An array of simple virtual guns including HOT, LT, CT, and last-GF. This virtual gun array is segmented on distance and does not use rolling stats at all.

What does it save between rounds and matches?: All relevant statistics between rounds; nothing between matches.

Where did you get the name?: I made the colors first, and eventually ended up naming the robot after what they reminded me of.

Update the basic guns. It has a pretty good system for picking which gun to use, but none of the targeting systems even go beyond the level of my micros by themselves.
Make the basic movement better. Sort of similar to the gun issue; it has a lot of fancy tricks but the basic algorithm behind rating the danger of spots could be much better.
Find a way to beat strong bots. I'm not quite sure if the issue is that the gun can't hit surfing due to the absense of any real anti-surfing targeting or that the movement lacks a flattener and is thus vulnerable to more advanced targeting, but
Beat the Bullet Shielders, which should be fairly simple.

Does it have any White Whales?: As stated before, PricklyPear gets inordinately low scores against good robots.

Everyone who has ever helped me or thought of an idea/concept that is used in this robot. For a complete list, find a list of RoboWiki users:-P

@@ Line 29: / Line 29: @@
 ; How competitive is it?
-: It's in a very early state right now, so it's ranked in the sixties in the rumble. But in every day, and in every way, its getting better and better.
+: Top 100 in the general rumble.
 == Strategy ==