Talk:Main Page

Does robo rumble work?

hi im new to robocode, been doing it as part of my uni course and i was wondering, is it possible to run roborumble at home anymore because ive follwed the instructions and none of the battles ive been doing have been uploading.... Quietus 15:47, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Yep! It sure as he heck still works! The thing is, the rumble.fervir.com server has been kind of broken for a while. You need to point your client at this URL instead now (See here for more information). There's new fanciness in that server too :) --Rednaxela 19:48, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Article count

A couple questions about the article count (after having some trouble Googling for answers). First, why isn't it updating automatically? Is that something I can trigger to update, or add to the "job queue", does anyone know? (Notice if you edit / preview it is higher than 43, which it reads on the main page right now.) Second, what qualifies as an "article"? Is there a minimum length that a page needs to be (other than not being a user or talk page) to qualify as an article? --Voidious 19:56, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

The main page just updated, it now says 48 articles. Also, the statistics page says that there are 145 pages total, but it is excluding, "talk pages, pages about RoboWiki, minimal 'stub' pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages." --AaronR 20:00, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

According to the MediaWiki wiki (now that's a mouthful), the main page will come up to date as soon as its HTML cache is invalidated, at which point all of the templates, etc. will be transcluded again. Don't know if that helps... --AaronR 20:27, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Font size

Just out of curiosity, why is the font size so large here compared to, say, Wikipedia? I know, I know, it's the same as the old wiki's font, but that wiki didn't have a sidebar. --AaronR 07:04, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Primarily because I thought "x-small" was just too small, and yes, it was also just sooo much smaller than the old wiki. I also figured that with the skins options, we could easily give people more choices to choose their own style, anyway. I will confess that tiny fonts for the sake of sleeker designs is a major pet peeve of mine. :-P --Voidious 07:12, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Smileys :-)

I would be relly nice if we could somehow support smile, e.g. just as simple as stating:

[[Image:HappySmiley.png]]

--Flemming N. Larsen 09:04, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons has a whole section of GFDL'd or public domain smileys (look at the link at the bottom for more). I don't really see the point though. If you want to upload them and use them, feel free, but I'll stick with =) on the wiki. --AaronR 01:21, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Maths Markup

Is it possible to turn on the math rendering like on Wikipedia? Sometimes, a properly rendered maths formula is easier to understand than the java code implementing it.

For example, have a look at some of the non-java code on the Circular Targeting Walkthrough. Now imagine how less understandable it would be without the sigmas and integral signs. Currently, they are just off-site images. This is not ideal--if the images get moved/deleted, the page would break. --Duyn 05:25, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Old wiki

The old wiki is not working (error 500), and so my roborumble client (it cannot find the list of partecipants), but i see many client is uploading. What is your solution? --Lestofante 10:35, 1 Dic 2008 (UTC)

The clients currently running are just using the last copy of the participants list they downloaded from the old wiki. I emailed PEZ a bit ago and got a reply that he'll look into it so hopefully the old wiki will be up again in not too long. If that ends up taking longer than expected though, we could update/fix the participants page on the new wiki and point clients at that instead. (Note: Don't point clients at the one on the new wiki just yet, it's out of date and such. It needs to be copied over from a downloaded copy of the list from the old wiki) --Rednaxela 12:00, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

maybe we can drop definitely the old wiki for roborumble client, or better every ramble server can implements it's own participants list, maybe integrated with general wiki list --Lestofante 15:13, 1 Dic 2008 (UTC)

I'd agree that migrating to using the new wiki participants list would be good, though I think some more veteran wikiers/rumblers than myself should give their input before any such switch is made 'official'. As far as keeping a participants list with the rumble server, well, there's only one working rumble server at the moment so I'm not sure what good that would do, and furthermore multiple rumble server would be a bad thing I think becacuse it would divide the processing power that goes towards making the battles. --Rednaxela 17:47, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

That's right, then I thing the server have to had a mirror of the wiki's official participants list, so in this case we can continue run our client, simple we cannot modify the list (if the two list are not synchronize together) --Lestofante 21:49, 1 Dic 2008 (UTC)

Time-based Rumble Types Proposal

The conversation is about the possibility of adding new rumble types in Robocode that are limited by time per tick instead of code size. Some participants suggest that this would encourage bots to make more time tradeoff decisions and could potentially lead to more diverse strategies. However, there are concerns about how to categorize these bots and the difficulty of accurately measuring time per tick. Some suggest using a fixed tick time competition, while others point out that the Robocode engine's control over CPU time is not precise enough for this task. There is also mention of the possibility of using Java bytecode instrumentation to assign fixed costs to different Java bytecode instructions, but this is seen as too complicated to implement.

-- ChatGPT

I don't think code size is a good limiter for different rumble types, because it forces people to do all sorts of tricks which results in very difficult to understand code. In addition, code size is so small compared to memory now that it hardly seems relevant in most cases. What if new rumble types were added where time per tick is the limiting factor: QuickRumble, with half the time, FastRumble 1/4, HyperRumble 1/8, SlowRumble 2x, etc. (Names are arbitrary) This would mean bots in faster rumbles would have to make more time tradeoff decisions, (less precise prediction? more approximate GFs?), and perhaps bots in slower rumbles could find a use for non-KNN classification schemes that required more time. What do you think?

Tick time size sound like a fantastic idea, I think robocode has some built in constants which potentially can be tweaked for time based rumbles.

But, I would still keep size based categories. I personally amazed how much can be squeezed into small code. It is indeed unreadable, but they set a bar and send a strong hint to me when those little gizmos level my megabot.

I'm not advocating the destruction of the codesize limited rumbles, just the addition of time limited ones.

The problem is categorizing them. Right now they are automatically sorted into the categories, since codesize is a compile time constant. However time limiting is a run time value. You would have to run a number of battles to place a robot. Even then you need to decide if something that is under the certain limit 99.9% of the time but over 0.1% of the time should be in which category, and so forth.

Well, we can make a time tick fixed competitions. Every one participate but bots which designed with time constrains in mind will sort to the top by themselves.

I think it is analogous to current size based system: nano bots participate in mega bots competitions and have good chances, but it is not true in reverse. Though here we can participant selection in advance.

So all we need is good tick measure, which is not that easy with current CPU which tend to throttle and boost their performance.

In my model, you could submit any bot to any category, but it would skip turns if it took too long for that category. So time limits implemented the same way they are now, but with different categories.

The problem I have with this idea, is that the Robocode engine's control over CPU time is far too approximate for that task.

The nature of such a league is to encourage people to push the limit of the alotted CPU time, however one can expect the calibration of CPU time to be off by wide margins between different computers, or even different runs on the same computer.

If one wants to have a league where the CPU time is a primary design constraint for bots, we need an engine with more precise management of this, such as by using Java bytecode instrumentation to assign fixed costs to different Java bytecode instructions... but that... that gets very complicated to implement.

I agree that would be the best way, and also very expensive to implement. If the VM itself tracked it, that would be another story, but as far as I know, it doesn't.

what would happen if the VM itself tracked it

When I look at discussion threads, I do not see anymore separate post highlighting? The whole discussion with action links now looks like one a single continuous stream.

Does anyone else experience it?

I experienced the same bug two weeks ago. But it seems fixed for me now, even though I didn't do anything.

Perhaps it's an intermittent issue?

The issue seems to be with the js resources which fails to load

I have a theory about the root cause of the problem, but I need more data to confirm.

Can someone experiencing this issue please open the browser console (F12 -> Console tab), and post the contents of it? Also, which browser are you using?

If I my idea is right, you should see Uncaught ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined.

Same here. That's why I suspect the cause is js resources. However this issue seems to happen some time, and disappear some time. Maybe browser caches that once it successfully loads.

I see something else in Firefox:

SyntaxError: illegal character load.php:1:190

When I go to

view-source:http://robowiki.net/w/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=monobook&version=20140108T004349Z

After character 190 it is a bunch of strange characters. I guess something was corrupted on the database?

Yeah, it looks like jQuery is missing a byte somewhere.

It seems there are two separate problems then.

Everyone who sees Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token is:

• Using Monobook (the default skin), either by choice or by not being logged in.
• Experiencing this problem continuously.
• The root cause is that this script, which should contain jQuery and MediaWiki frontend code, has parts of it overwritten with 155648 0x00 bytes.
• Because that script does not parse, the loading process is broken.
• This probably requires a server-side fix.
• People seeing this: Skilgannon

Meanwhile, everyone who sees Uncaught ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined is:

• Using the Vector skin.
• Using Chrome.
• Experiencing this problem intermittently.
• For the Vector skin, this script, which contains jQuery and MediaWiki frontend code, it perfectly fine.
• However, that script is loaded by this script through document.write() of a <script> tag.
• Chrome is known to block the use of document.write() to load scripts on slow Internet connections.
• Thus, since the script that contains and exposes jQuery is not loaded, other code that depends on it errors with Uncaught ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined.
• Possible fix: Go to chrome://flags, set "Block scripts loaded via document.write" to "Disabled", and restart your browser.
• People experiencing this: Xor and past me