Anti-Surfer Challenge/Pre-Chat

Pre-Chat

While it's not that useful for increasing RoboRumble performance, a lot of us enjoy trying to improve our Anti-Surfer Targeting. It's a big part of claiming the PL throne. We have surfers in the TC2K6 and TC2K7, but this would be an opportunity to update and expand the test bed. My initial thoughts:

• I actually think the TC2K7 surfers are all good candidates. I'd definitely vote to keep Shadow (classic, awesome DC-surfer) and CassiusClay (classic, awesome VCS-surfer). Hydra (related to WaveSerpent) is still the top DC surfer.
• In the present RoboRumble, 6 of the top 10 and 11-12 of the top 20 (not sure about RougeDC) are using DC surfing, so we should have more of those.
• How many reference bots? 10? 12? 15? I say start at 10 and if there are specific bots we really want, consider increasing it.
• Classic TC rules OK?
  • 35 rounds or 500 rounds? I like 500, myself, but 35 seems logical.

We could nominate, vote, then maybe discuss and have follow-up votes for tweaking the final set, to make sure we get the desired mix.

Anyone else interested? =)

--Voidious 15:16, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

I prefer 35 rounds. 10 bots should be enough. Surfers are slow, I don't want to let my computer run for 3 days to run 15 seasons of this challenge =) We should have 5 DC surfer and 5 VCS surfer. It would be good if we can have the not-yet-exist mixed surfer. I think we can ask Skilgannon to add the DC to DrussGT. I think we should have Engineer as a NN surfer too. » Nat | Talk » 15:30, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Engineer is interesting, but it's not open source, and I'm not sure it would be a good benchmark because it's so unique. I'd personally rather have the real DrussGT than a DC version, but Wintermute seems a fine candidate. While I generally aim for fast-executing reference bots, in this case I'd vote for just getting the right reference bots and accepting the CPU cost. Benchmarking Anti-Surfer Targeting takes time, that's life. =) --Voidious 15:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

As a testbed I propose:

• DC:
  • YersiniaPestis (very hard to hit, has multiple weighting schemes, flattener, also quite slow, I'm not sure about movement alone though)
  • Shadow (hard to hit, has flattener, runs fast)
  • Hydra (possibly vulnerable to antisurfer guns?)
  • Horizon or RougeDC (intermediate DC implementation
  • CunobelinDC (very simple DC implementation)
• VCS:
  • DrussGT (we need a goto bot, but they aren't very common - otherwise possibly Silversurfer due to execution speed reasons)
  • Phoenix (sorry Voidious, but Dookious's movement is really slow =) )
  • CassiusClay (classic)
  • Garm --------?? does Garm support movement only?
  • Komarious (essentially CunobelinDC's VCS counterpart)

Perhaps cull out Hydra and Garm, but I think that covers things fairly well. Feedback? --Skilgannon 16:38, 10 July 2009 (UTC)