User talk:Skilgannon

Hi Skilgannon, you said on my talk page that your melee wavesurfing is almost complete. Can you give me your prototype? I hate to suffer all those waves up :) I've idea to surf it in both my talk page and Rednaxela's talk page. You can find my email at my use page. It seem that both you and Rednaxela are working on melee wavesurfing. Thanks! » Nat | Talk » 13:51, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I actually want to get it working before I release it. And it's definitely still very far from completion. It can barely keep track of waves, never mind precise prediction for figuring out where to move, or stats for figuring out where is dangerous, etc. This is much more difficult in melee because there is no GF-0, because there are many bots that could be the target. Also, being the only bot of it's kind in the wild, I'm going to keep it closed source until other implementations are around. This is so that people figure out their own ways of doing things. I believe the reason the majority of 1v1 surfing bots TrueSurf is because RaikoMX was released as open source. I'll provide ideas etc, but until a significantly different system of melee surfing appears I'm not going to release the code, simply because it will stifle growth. --Skilgannon 19:48, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Here here! What I find interesting is that we're approaching melee surfing from the opposite directions. I'm starting with a new method system for deciding how/where to move, whereas you're starting with melee wave tracking. It will be interesting to see how our two melee surfing beasts will eventually fare against eachother in combat! I don't plan to release the code until about the same time for the same reason. Also, two bots kicking Shadow off of it's melee throne might result in interesting counters from ABC... --Rednaxela 20:10, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah... I want it because I had problem to create a new thing from scatch! I must have some (or only a little) scaffold to work around. I've ton of ideas about this and want to implemenmts it, but I can't due my currently problem of myself! Please, give me your implementation (the Skilgannon's one). I've no problem reading other people code, no matter how ugly they are. (I almost understand Shadow from its decompiled class now) But if you not want to share it, I must get rid of my problem right away :) Maybe I'll start work on Komarious's instead. I've ideas on both wave tracking and moving now (on my talk page and Rednaxela's talk page). Let see who'll be the first to release it! Maybe 3 bots kicking Shadow throne. If we successfully kick Shadow might result in Deja Vu like in 2003 when SandboxDT successful beaten by Shadow. I'll have school holiday in 2 weeks, I'll spent a month on this melee surfing (plus BlackHole rewrite) » Nat | Talk »

Member of all clubs/parties of Robocode Community

Congratulations! As fas as I know, you have been in all clubs/parties that exist in the Robocode community. That includes:

• The 2000 Club
• The 2000 Club/Mini
• The 2000 Club/Micro
• The 2100 Club
• The 2100 Club/Mini
• Top Ten DC Party
• The Kings Club (even that isn't updated for you yet)

Have I missed any clubs/parties? » Nat | Talk » 14:09, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, my adventures into nanobots haven't been particularly successful. I find I don't have enough room to try anything new, and end up retrying old and tested formulas, in fact last time I tried I ended up with something pretty much exactly the same as WeekendObsession. And I haven't released a Melee Bot yet. I've got big hopes for my Melee Surfing, but it's gotten so complicated just keeping track of enemy waves that I'm not sure it will run fast enough to really be viable. But I think you covered all the clubs I've been in, yes =) --Skilgannon 14:21, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

But there're no melee clubs out there! I've recently work with melee surfing but I don't think it is really effective since you can't detect everything that go over the battle. The better solution I've found is to make it a plug-in for Minimum Risk Movement (as I'm creating in TheRiver) » Nat | Talk » 14:31, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

On the topic, you're the first person since Jamougha (in March 2004) to simultaneously hold the top spots in MegaBot, MiniBot, and MicroBot 1v1. Congrats dude! =) --Voidious 19:06, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks =D Now, I should probably take time to go do some varsity work... affine approximations and Green's/Stoke's Theorems... bleh. I think there's a good chance I'll be working on CunobelinDC some more in the near future... ;-) --Skilgannon 15:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

For some reason, your Toorkild revert isn't appearing in the rumble. --Miked0801 17:52, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

jk.micro.Toorkild 0.2.4 (the reverted to version) is showing fine here. Except.... for some reason only it's mega-battles from before the revert survived... Something is slightly odd on the rumble server --Rednaxela 18:09, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

By the way, a belated congrats on getting to two years as RoboRumble King! Good luck making it to three. =) --Voidious 03:15, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

with the challenge from Voidious =) --Nat Pavasant 05:43, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll do my best =) I really believe Boosting has huge promises for improving my surfing, I'm just struggling to figure out how to create an online algorithm that will run within the time constraints of Robocode.--Skilgannon 05:51, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Congrats also! Hmmm... depending on things, I may just have a lot of time to devote to putting in some more competition in the coming year... Oh, about boosting, I haven't tried such with movement, but one could call my various 'adaptively-mixed-targeting' attempts a type of boosting and I have had some success with it. What I'm not so sure about though, is whether there is enough data to do it accurately enough to be worthwhile in surfing. Really, surfing systems have so much less data to learn from and it's hard to judge the goodness of algorithms from each other without much data. I think the lack of data would be trickier than time constraints (after all, I have made forms that are efficient as far as time constraints go. --Rednaxela 05:59, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The trouble is, you were weighting 3 (?) different guns, whereas I have 100 buffers to weight. Added to this, I'd rather weight them as each VCS set of bins, rather than weighting the entire buffer at once. So, not only do I have 30x the number of things to weight, but they also come on and offline pretty much unpredictably. They don't all have the same amount of logged hit locations, so my weighting has to be datasize-independant. I've made an algorithm that I'm using to weight the data depending on how 'clustered' it is. I'm thinking of reversing that weighting now, to magnify differences in the non-clustered data rather than try to suppress data that isn't nicely clustered. When I get a moment of free time... --Skilgannon 06:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, I do have it datasize independent, because it mixes results using only firing waves, and not using firing waves. In the case of Midboss, it's weighting the result of 4 or 5 differently configured anti-aliased/interpolated VCS configurations. Really, I feel the quality of output for each anti-aliased/interpolated VCS table is good enough that simply throwing more of the same in wouldn't help. The story is rather different with conventional VCS configurations of course. But anyway, yeah, the number of things to weight is quite different. Basing it on how nicely things are clustered sounds interesting. To compare to the "compare where they go to what was expected" model my method is using, it sounds like it could probably make more out of less data, however sounds significantly more intensive to process the data. It would also act differently against adaptive opponents. Simply reflecting on the data spread would work well when their profile stays the same, however I think could get tricked very easily when when they change modes or adapt. That said, perhaps it would make sense to make groups of your 100 configurations that work against different things, use "reflective" weighting within those groups, and then use "functional" weighting to weight those groups overall? --Rednaxela 14:27, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Hi Skilgannon,

I think you have page deletion permission. We need it, since there are hundreds of spam pages whcih appeared on wiki today.

May be there is a way to get such permissions to new crop of users. Looks like many previously active advanced users are not here anymore.

An admin can mass-cleanup the spam by using Special:Nuke on suspicious users from Special:ActiveUsers, as well as suspicious edits from Special:RecentChanges.

In the light of this, I would like to nominate User:Beaming and User:Cb for admin rights.

Skilgannon's email can be found in Contacts.

More discussion on this attack can be found here and here.

More suggestions:

• IP-ban these bozos.
• Do some of the stuff mentioned here.
• Merge all spam accounts together so we can keep track of them more easily.
• Delete/hide spam entries from Special:RecentChanges.

I also nominating User:MultiplyByZer0 because of active presence at wiki and a lot of clean up effort coming from this user.

Current time: 2017-08-26T09:51:12.423Z

Spammers left to go: 0

Thanks for listing those bot! I think we should take action as soon as possible, e.g. disable account creation and delete spam accounts.

Then may be we should try to add some CAPTCHA for new users?

I made CAPTCHA suggestions here.

I believe it is possible that these spammers are not bots, but low-paid humans working in huge "spam farms". A registration CAPTCHA should therefore require at least basic knowledge of Robocode (e.g. name one sample bot).

In any case, nothing is going to happen until Skilgannon wakes up.

Great ideas! Thank you for your effort!

Yes registration only CAPTCHA can be easily skipped by low paid humans, however it seems that the spams are created by machines — therefore adding a CAPTCHA when creating/editing pages for new users may help ;)

Given that every new spam user posts about 3 pages and then stop, I would say that bots hacked the CAPTCHA algorithm.

I think we should make registration harder and then we will be fine.

I have blocked and deleted the pages of the following entries. (Move them to a bottom list or something?)

Abdul
Abhi2828
Abhishek.upadhyay11
Adamsmith
Ahmad1234
Ahmadd123
Ajaykapadia2
Akki
Alex
Alexa
Alexdogge1
Alexyokei
Alhaji
Amit8923
Andoralifs
Andrusmith1
Anisingh
Anjilajolia
Anjilajoliaa
ANNU17
Anshu01
Araja
Asdasd
Ashish12345
Ashish786786
Astrologerbaba16
Avisupport
Baba786
Bisafepa
Bitcoinsssupport
Blizzardbluee
Bookentry
Bradyswan
Brandi84
Bujelizala
Caira
Caleb
Cbkjvjvkd
Chorsupport
Chunnu7294383gulabo
Cooljass1
Cuwerokume
Cybertechnisdhhdh
Dabbu
Dante
Dasfgs
Dear
Depih12
Dev123
Dexter6789
Dfasffasf
Dfgvfgvfsd5
Dfjhfgj
Dfsdf
Dgdfhfgjhfgh
Dhanraj99
Dinni999
Dk923478
Dolka01
Dpkapadia1
Dsgdfhg
Dsgsdhjfe
Dykywipy
Ellis S Skinner
Emma000001
Emmawatson
Emmie2680
Engineer123
Ergugfdguf
Eswt
Faer
Fairsearches.pradeep
Faisal
Faulkner
Fdbhdf525
Fibarip
Frankgel
Fransis99
Fullsupport
Gakllerjohn
Gattu
Ghfdhfg
Ghufgt567121
Gibson
Ginjuilinhj
Gk707027
Gofyozilto
Gopalamj
Gtrtgum
Guwogepome
Hajsfdjorkgpgk12
Harryji
Hemantvar
Herry9
Ginjuilinhj

Hi Chase,

Could you please revert back Help:Editing?

And also restore the Main Page's talk page, which is here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/Talk:$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572

And also RoboWiki:Copyrights

Okay, it looks like GrubbmGait and Voidious are blocking spam accounts, and account creation has been disabled.

We still need to fix the main page, though.

I have located the main page here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572

Unfortunately, I do not have permissions to move it back.

Thanks everyone for jumping in here! I turned off account creation again (for now), blocked a bunch of accounts, and mass deleted the pages they created. Also restored the Main Page (thanks for pointing to it!). I'll continue later, but I am a little busy at work atm / today...

We have faced a lot of wiki spam - we have Captcha on account creation, some custom anti-spam code, no anonymous edits. But eventually we just fell too far behind. Like MultiplyByZero said, I think these may be a mix of bots and real people. Surely we could get to a decent setup with upgrading MediaWiki and finding the right plugins, we just never made time (yet).

And yeah, I'd love to discuss getting a new admin or two on board! We haven't added anybody new in a while and indeed all the current ones are sort of retired.

Thanks a lot User:Voidious, User:GrubbmGait, and User:Chase-san for cleaning the wiki. Special thanks to User:MultiplyByZer0 for tracking spamming users.

I have been through all the accounts of the 'Active users list' and Mass deleted and blocked the appropriate accounts. Seems that all New created pages are deleted at this moment. In that active users list still some spammers are listed, but they did more subtle things like minor edits and moving pages. Someone with a bit more knowlegde of wiki-stuff should go through their contributions and try to erase those.

Thanks for this colossal work. I've seen you deleting non stop for at least an hour.

Would you be able to revert some important pages as well? They are listed above this thread in reply to Chase-san.

Talk:Main Page has been restored afaik. But for the other two, without knowing where they went, it is hard for me to revert them.

Crap... I am very sorry guys. My git sync with wiki goofed up. I incindently restored spam pages.

Good news they all marked and sit in Category:Spam

They are removed (again), for this time I did not block you ;-) Note that a lot of new users have been created without any contributions yet, so spamming is still possible. And it would be nice if the 'Deletion log's could be hidden, now it is almost impossible to see what normal contributions have been made the last few days/weeks.

I have scanned through 'all pages' and deleted all spampages there, luckily easy to recognize due to loooong page names. Afaik no more spam is present, just some contributions from the Active user list that I can't locate anywhere. So, my 'spamming' of deletion logs is over, so Xor and Dsekercioglu and others can now see any discussions again.

‎Heartgold537 just spammed. It seems we forget somebody?

Those buggers are smart. They create an account and then spam from it after some time passes. This is exactly what GrubbmGait predicted above.

We just need to embrace ourself for couple weeks. I suggest to put

[[Category:Spam]]

text within the offending pages so admins have easier time to track them down.

Yes it helps. Anyway, the best way against human spammers is that we have more people than them;) At least with more admins it really helps.

MultiplyByZer0 sees the wiki very frequently, we would react to spammers much faster if he were admin as well;)

Well, we just need to be patient. As much as I hate spammers, wiki will run even with spam inside. Wiki is not the twitter where everything should be immediately up-to-date.

I personally monitor Recent changes in my rss reader, so I see the invasion within couple hours. But we cannot expect admin reaction time to be much faster than a day or even week.

This is not the first spam wave (though the largest I remember) which we survived.

See Thread:Talk:RoboRumble/Participants/Remove bots with underscores in version numbers?/reply (2)

Would you mind removing the retired ones with underscores in version numbers from the rumble please?

Hi, Thanks for opening the code. I am looking forward to digest it. One question, I noticed that many bot have booleans labeled TC and MC. Are these for target and movement challenges? If so where is the bots collection and who runs the challenge?

These flags are for competing in the challenges, not for being part of a challenge. So putting TC=true disables the movement, and MC=true disables the gun.

Although maybe I misunderstood you, the following are where it is used: movement challenges: Movement Challenge and Movement Challenge 2K6, targeting challenges: Targeting Challenge, Targeting Challenge 2K6 and Targeting Challenge 2K7.

You run the battles yourself using something like RoboResearch, which puts out the results in a wiki-friendly format.

Also Targeting Challenge RM, which I think is the most useful one.

And also RoboRunner / RoboJogger has some advantages over RoboResearch, the main one being a big speed increase because it doesn't restart the JVM after every match.

Yes, you understood me right. I've seen the pages about those challenges in the wiki, but since I jump the train to late, I missed the discussion of their purpose. Which, I am guessing, are to tune guns and movements separately. But on those pages, I've seen long tables with ranking, so I thought they were created by some sort of a statistics bot, like we have with rumble now.

Also, I am big fan of RoboRunner. I just need to find a proper subset of bots to correlate its results with the full rumble. I sometimes see an improvement vs. my local subset and a drop in a rumble.

Oh, right, I remember seeing that you used RoboRunner, which made me happy. :-)

The targeting challenges I consider pretty useful and a good predictor of rumble performance. The movement challenges, less so. My most useful Robocode testing was usually against large test beds constructed with BedMaker. I updated it in July to work with LiteRumble, if you want to give it a try.

I should try it, but the question is which bots to choose? Assuming incremental improvements, should I aim to gain vs top bots or similar score ones?

The reason I ask for your wisdom is the following. I recall once I gain a couple of points against top bots, but the score was worse for majority of the medium and lower bots. This happens when I added more advance guns to be dodged to an enemy bot. This helped against top bots, but weaker bots gained on me. I still puzzled by it.

So ideal test bed, should have a representative from each group.

Also, a side note. I noticed that Diamond sometimes get disabled right at the beginning of the game. Most likely some minor bug but if you fix it, you might get to the 1st place. I think this bug happens only in melee.

The one movement challenge which I found was a good indicator of rumble performance was the MC2K7, since there you have a gun (everybody has the same gun), and your opponent moves, so you have the same incentives to improve as in the actual rumble.

So I just noticed the "meleeTop30rumble" ... Are we specifically trying NOT to call it the "GigaMeleeRumble"? :-) I was just getting archived rankings working again (and @roborumble on Twitter) and paused at what to call it. Any objection to GigaMeleeRumble?

No objections here. Also, glad to see you pulled back into this world of battle.

I managed to get Nene up two more ranks recently (But haven't really been working on it much tbh).

Haha, thanks. :-) It's nice to get rrtweeter and rrarchiver up and running again, but don't expect a new version of Diamond any time soon. :-P

Why not? ;)

The only thing I'm still interested in is beating DrussGT head-to-head. But ever since I started development on BerryBots, it's just felt wrong to spend any of my recreational coding time on Robocode bots. I've got the new AngularJS web UI mostly done and I also have a cool new stage that I want to write. Plus I've got an entirely new, fully web-based game in mind which is just in brainstorm / research phase... So yeah, Robocode bots are a no-go. :-)

Well, I would argue the GigaRumble should be renamed to the Top30Rumble. I was the one who created the meleeTop30rumble. The name make sense to me. Top30 is self speaking, unlike GigaMeleeRumble which confusingly seems to be opposite of nano/micro/mini, i.e. refers to the size. I presume it has some historical roots, but I joined robocode too late to know the meaning of the Giga name.

May be someone with longer presence can enlighten us about the Giga name history.

Well, originally the name was Strongest Bots Rumble. Yeah, I used "giga" as a riff on (bigger than) "mega" when we finally implemented it, whatever 9 years later.