View source for Talk:RoboRumble

RoboRumble history

April 27 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is now moved to Pulsar's machine. See /TemporaryServerUp for the RR@H settings files to use and some more details. The only difference you should note is that the flag-less bots no longer have the Jolly Roger flag. This is temporary and will be fixed soon. Huge thanks to Pulsar for carrying the burden (reponsibility-wise) a while with this. I'll sleep tighter now when I don't need to worry if my WinXP Home PC (yes, it was hosted in such an environment before!) is awake and responsive. -- PEZ

October 28 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server will be down for several hours for upgrades tomorrow (Saturday Octber 29). As a side effect this will solve the issues some people have with port 8080. --Pulsar

October 29 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is going down shortly and will be up and running again within 12hours hopefully. -- Pulsar

October 29 2005 - The RoboRumble@Home server is up and running. Updates are needed for RoboRumble@Home clients. -- Pulsar

February 18 2006 - The RoboRumble@Home server connection might experience some downtime the following hours as I will reorganize the firewall setup. --Pulsar

March 7 2006 - The firewall switch over has now finally been done, and everything seems to be working. Some people might experience a short delay until DNS records have been updated around the world (though they were and are set to a very short "time to live" to minimize this). RoboRumble@Home clients need to be restarted as Java by default caches DNS lookups. --Pulsar

Subpages

Should we replace ALL of the subpages? or just the 'important' ones? -- Starrynte 22:16, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Name

Since the new wiki supports symbols in page names, should we put this page at RoboRumble@Home instead of RoboRumble? We already have a redirect from that page to this one... --AaronR 23:34, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I second this change. » Nat | Talk » 02:30, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

RR seems to be down

Roborumble is returning 503 Unavailable for all pages today. Not sure why. -- Synapse 03:07, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure? Both rumble.fervir.com and ABC's work for me. -- KetsuNfwu 03:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I fail. I meant Robocode Repository. -- Synapse 05:44, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Not a big surprise there. =P -- KetsuNfwu 13:21, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi! What the heck happened to RR@H again? The main roborumble has only ~60 bots again... Otherwise, I uploaded Pugio 1.2 1 week ago and has only 120 battles in nanoRumble. Situation is the same in Darcanuck's page, too. Nobody is contributing?--HUNRobar 12:30, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Both ABC's server and DarkCanuck's server have no full pairings yet. Once the megabots have full pairings, the minirumble will get filled completely and as last the micro- and nano-rumble. Be patient, but it probably requires a few weeks before all nanobots have 1000 battles. Remember, 640 * 640 bots means a lot of battles! Pulsar's server has another issue. I don't know what happened, but I still run (repair)battles there. --GrubbmGait 13:14, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I realised that in Darcanuck's server the older versions of bots are still in game. I think the competitors there should be cleaned up. For example, I don't want to generate battles for Pugio 1.0 when I wait for the results of 1.2. --HUNRobar 14:57, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

That's a temporary thing -- I'm uploading a huge amount of data from ABC's server which includes old participants. There's a big performance hit to activating/retiring participants repeatedly, so for now everyone's in the rankings until I get caught up. But don't worry, no rumble clients will actually run these bots. They'll use only the version from the participants list. In a few days you should see the old bots disappear from the rankings. --Darkcanuck 15:03, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoops edit conflict, accidentally overwrote Darkcanuck's reply with this: "What versions get battles doesn't depend on the server, it depends on the participants list that clients are configured to (which should be the old wiki's one, the one here has not been synced for a long time). The server would have nothing to do with that so you shouldn't be generating battles for Pugio 1.0 unless your client is misconfigured I believe." Anyways Darkcanuck's reply clearly explains why there are currently old versions listed :) --Rednaxela 15:10, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks but I'm very excited about the results of Pugio 1.2. :)--HUNRobar 17:40, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Why can't I access ABC's server? My connection get timeout before it finished loading! -Nat 12:42, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Lynch the Multi-Threaders!

A thought just occurred to me. I have never liked the fact that robots could be threaded. Why?

1. On a single-core (non-hyperthreaded) machine it cannot help the bot without hurting the opponent. Either a) all computation is done on one CPU during your turn, in which case you could have done the same computation with less overhead without the threads, or b) you do computation past your turn, eating up CPU cycles from your opponent.
2. On a multi-core (or hyperthreaded) machine, it violates the idea that all bots are equal except for their AI. You suddenly get 2 CPU's in your robot, essentially.

This is a reality we have had to live with, because that's the way robocode is designed. HOWEVER - it just occurred to me that we could enforce a rule saying that no multi-threaded bot is allowed in the rumble! Which I hereby propose. Besides being unfair to the bot's opponent, acting like a virus stealing CPU, it steals CPU from bots in OTHER battles now-a-days when more than one rumble client executes at a time on multi-core machines! Any bot caught using multiple threads would be immediately removed from the rumble. Does anybody agree? --Simonton 02:47, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. It isn't fair on the opposition, and makes it impossible to design a bot within the CPU-constant constraints. --Skilgannon 10:34, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

I either didn't see or forgot about this section. There are already bots that use multiple threads in the rumble: Toad definitely does, possibly X2 (which shares some Toad code), and probably others. Not sure how I feel about removing them at this point, just contributing some facts here... --Voidious 02:20, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, there are java APIs that allow things like only measuring the time used in a particular thread. Robocode could start to use these in order to make this fair, AND as a major bonus it would make using Robocode on a computer with a heavily loaded CPU not cause skipped turns. The issue is... those APIs don't give the same kind of resolution, thus meaning that the only way we do it would be if we calculated something more like "How much CPU time did threads of this bot use in the last 20 ticks?", instead of "How much time did this robot take between the start and end of this turn?" which would make skipped turns behave a bit different. Personally I think that may not be such a bad thing, but I'm not really entirely sure... --Rednaxela 02:51, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

It looks like this » Nat | Talk » 12:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm? "ERROR This artifact is not accessible." is what that page gives --Rednaxela 13:11, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I never noticed that this is 'private' tracker... Fnl thought that he needs more precise time and mem.usage detection. I have a comment on some time measuring much like to your "How much CPU time did threads of this bot use in the last 20 ticks?". However, we didn't mention a thread at all. But I believe that Robocode allow Robots to create up to 5 threads, I'll email Fnl this. » Nat | Talk » 13:53, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

The tracker is public now. :-) Basically, I want to measure the CPU usage with the new features in Java 5.0 for measuring the exact CPU per thread. Hence we will (when using the TheadMXBean) know for a fact exactly how much time all threads in a robot is using in total. However, the time interval when measuring using the ThreadMXBean is big compared to what we are used to with the CPU constant currently used in Robocode. So we need a solution that can deal with this issue. I have waited with this improved feature as this will have a big impact on the scores for the robots in the RoboRumble. We have already seen how much difference the getNextVelocity() makes, so imagine the difference when we make change the concept behind the CPU constant. --Fnl 21:07, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I'm actually not too worried about the impact of this change. Most bots don't skip many turns at all, and the effects of a few skipped turns are often overstated. As long as the average amount of CPU allowed per tick is still similar, I can't imagine it affecting scores too much. I suppose it might have a big impact on bots that abuse the currently untracked multi-threading, but I think we can all agree that they're sort of abusing the system right now, anyway. Of course, I'd be happy to run extensive tests, too. =) --Voidious 21:55, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm agreement with Voidious on this. I doubt there would be any problems caused by this so long as the correct amount of time was chosen. I would say though, that I think that this feature should be targeted at a 1.7.1.5 release, for the same reason that it's generally considered bad practice to change both a bot's movement and gun in the same rumble iteration, haha. As a side note, I wonder if while we improve the measurement method to not be affected by other things on the system, that maybe we should also improve the cpu constant calculation. For one, it should use the same ThreadMXBean methods to be accurate, but also I wonder if we could have a more realistic benchmark of what a typical bot actually does with it's time. I propose we include a small suite of some of the things a more cpu intensive bot does in order to create a more representative benchmark. I propose coding a small suite consisting of something like the following: 1) KD-Tree, 2) Nanobot-style pattern matching, 3) Array operations (searching for peak, addition of a gaussian curve to an array, multidimensional array access), 4) 'Play-It-Forward' simulation, 5) GF calculation (aka simple trig). I think I'll begin a page for comments on and code for an improved benchmark --Rednaxela 00:00, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

1.7.1.5? It was there for about eight months. I think maybe 1.8 or so... » Nat | Talk » 06:10, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

What Now?

How can I submit the new versions of DrussGT and Cunobelin? Has anybody heard any news on the old wiki? Will it be recovered? Is it gone forever? --Skilgannon 15:47, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Well on November 30th I emailed PEZ and got a reply that it's an ugly error and that he'd look into it. I haven't heard anything since but I guess I might email PEZ again. I certainly hope it won't be gone forever as I'd at least like to have a read-only version due to how much great stuff there is there that's unmigrated. --Rednaxela 16:12, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I really hope the old wiki content still lives on. In the meantime we could agree to use this wiki's list for my server. I don't have time this week to make the proposed participant list changes, but I could lock out add/removes for all but a few select clients to make sure we all use the same list? --Darkcanuck 18:28, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, the old wiki is back! I do wonder though, should we switch to using this wiki's participants list anyway? or should that wait till some other day in the future? --Rednaxela 18:17, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to keep using the old wiki at least until I can code up something to validate participants on the server side. Then it would be easier to switch and not have to worry about some clients using the wrong list. --Darkcanuck 05:39, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Random question: How much do you think the local client would speed up if I compiled it natively? Right now, we haev a bit of a bottleneck figuring out battles andif we could speed it up by a factor or 3 or so, why not? --Miked0801 21:52, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Nanos get little love when things get busy

I've been waiting for nearly 4 days for my latest bot to get to 2k battles against nanos, and I'm probably gonna have to wait 3 more for it to happen. Why? Nanos, after they get to their 1 battle per bot limit, are the last bots to be updated under the current system. I understand why the system was done this way, but is there anyway we can add a time component to the battle chooser to make sure that when things heat up in the rumble, nanos get some love as well? --Miked0801 20:47, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

I hear ya. Even in Mega-land, it can take a while to get to 2k battles, and I don't really trust a rating until it does (even with all pairings). There are some RR client options you could try, like excluding bots or running NanoRumble only, but the latter will just do random battles, I think. A couple of nice client side options, imo, would be mini/micro/nano while still honoring pairing priority, and ignoring pairings while running bots with under NUMBATTLES (in all applicable rumbles). I'm definitely in favor of RR contributors having control over what battles they want to run... --Voidious 22:48, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Nanos get way more than their fair share of processing time. By a time a nano reaches 2000 battles in its own class, it has typically reached 5000+ battles in the main rumble. Few, if any, megabots have yet to reach that level. Not only is it unfair to folks releasing larger bots, it also takes away cpu time from other nanos. So should we abolish nanos? Of course not!

I'd vote for changing the client's battle selection such that when a new bot reaches full pairings, the remainder of its 2000 battles are fought against opponents in its own size class. Those battles will still count for the higher classes, so a nano would really only need 2000 battles overall. This would mean faster results for nanos and more cpu time for everyone else, regardless of size. --Darkcanuck 03:19, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

I second Darkcanuck's suggestion, as it seems most fair to me. :) --Rednaxela 05:12, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

And yet, some nanos love to beat up on their larger sibling... But yes, when things slow down, nanos do get a ton of extra battles, but to be fair, most nanos run much, much faster than megas so the hit isn't that bad. My main concern was waiting at the back of a line of never ending micro/mega selections. Impatients and such. If we're going to change things to minimize waits, then first completing pairings, then 2k in class, then low priority updates across other classes would be awesome. Unlike melee, just 2 or 3 battles with a mega are usually sufficient to get a strong idea of where things stand. --Miked0801 09:10, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

You can also set RUNONLY=NANO, but alas then no priority battles are fought, just random ones. And I set the battlecount to 1000, so nanos will get their battles earlier. --GrubbmGait 10:51, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

• setting RUNONLY=NANO is not a good idea. The results only count for nano, so is not counted at micro/mini/mega. Setting the battlecount lower does pay off however, except when the bigger rumbles are flooded with new versions. --GrubbmGait 11:00, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

It would be awesome if roborumble could execute smart battles with runonly parameters. For example, run prioritary battles but only among nanos. I don't think it would be such a difficult developement. --HUNRobar 14:33, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the RUNONLY setting needs to be fixed -- as GrubbmGait pointed out, the battles don't get uploaded to the bigger size classes, which they should. I might put together a patch for this, but first I have some wave surfing to iron out... --Darkcanuck 17:41, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

About battlecount, one habit I have, is constantly making my battlecount set to just a little above the lowest value in the rumble. That seems to have nice results sometimes. --Rednaxela 16:03, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

All right, I think I've figured out how to implement the change I suggested, plus fix the RUNONLY problem. If enough people are ok with this, I'll put together a patched 1.6.1.4 client with the changes and send the patches to Fnl for future releases too. --Darkcanuck 18:21, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Quick question: Would this only affect the 1v1 pairing order? I definitely support it there, but making your suggested change in Melee pairings would have a major impact on some bots' scores... And thanks as always for your RoboRumble efforts! --Voidious 19:33, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Only at first. The game already does all class battles for roughly 50% of the numbers in nano now. That's why DustBunny has been slowly rising in APS - he does worse in nano only. --Miked0801 20:42, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, right now a NanoBot gets 2,000 battles against the whole field, then a bunch against MiniBots and below, then MicroBots and below, then NanoBots. With this change, it would get some amount of battles against the whole field, then all NanoBot-only battles. Depending on the bot, I think it could have an impact. Then again, that's a quirky aspect of MeleeRumble that's tough to really regulate, anyway, so maybe it's not worth worrying about. --Voidious 21:51, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, good point, I hadn't considered melee. It does use a different routine for preparing battles though, so it's possible to patch 1v1 without affecting melee. Looking at the melee routine, it does create an interesting mix of battles -- I didn't realize that there were all-nano matchups. That must skew the scores depending on the ratio of battles a nano gets with mixed sizes versus all-nano? --Darkcanuck 02:15, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it is a bug, i think it was made on purpose the way it is. Alas I don't remember the reason . . . --GrubbmGait 21:03, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Mobile Devices

Who here things I'm crazy to try running roborumble on my Ipod Touch? :) --Rednaxela 02:01, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

• Definitely crazy. --Simonton

I think you're crazy, but only because the iPhone OS doesn't have Java. =) I actually just looked into this the other day, lol. Was there some tech you were looking at to make it work? --Voidious 02:03, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually, when you don't limit yourself to the app store, there is a port of JamVM w/ GNU Classpath. There's no JIT so it won't be fast... but it'll run.. or... almost:

Iteration number 0
Downloading rating files ...
Downloading participants list ...
Downloading missing bots ...
Removing old participants from server ...
Preparing battles list ... Using smart battles is true
Prioritary battles file not found ...  
java.awt.AWTError: Cannot load AWT toolkit: gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit
   at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(Toolkit.java:607)
   at robocode.security.RobocodeSecurityManager.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.manager.RobocodeManager.initSecurity(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.control.RobocodeEngine.init(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.control.RobocodeEngine.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at roborumble.battlesengine.BattlesRunner.initialize(Unknown Source)
   at roborumble.battlesengine.BattlesRunner.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at roborumble.RoboRumbleAtHome.main(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Native library `gtkpeer' not found (as file `libgtkpeer') in gnu.classpath.boot.library.path and java.library.path
   at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary(Runtime.java:763)
   at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:662)
   at gnu.java.awt.peer.gtk.GtkToolkit.<clinit>(GtkToolkit.java:173)
   at java.lang.VMClass.forName(Native Method)
   at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:233)
   at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(Toolkit.java:583)
   ...7 more

It seems that both:

1. RobocodeSecurityManager is foolish and tries to query the default graphics toolkit even if run from the command line
2. The install of GNU Classpath is foolish and thinks it has GTK avaliable when it's running in command line only

Were it not for one or the other of those issues, it'd probably run just fine... Now can i fix this I wonder... --Rednaxela 02:13, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that would be really cool. But I'm a wuss and I'm afraid to jailbreak and void my iPhone's AppleCare; I was thinking more from the perspective of writing an iPhone app myself that could do it. Good luck, though, I'm curious to hear your results! --Voidious 02:17, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Aha! I got around that stupid issue! I just had to pass the VM -Djava.awt.headless=true... When you see rumble uploads with a user of "RednaxelaIPod", that'll be it :) --Rednaxela 02:32, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ouchie, building the robot database this first time sure isn't fast... --Rednaxela 02:39, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Sadly, while it mostly ran, it didn't quite work:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1
   at java.util.concurrent.CopyOnWriteArrayList.get(CopyOnWriteArrayList.java:27
5)
   at java.util.AbstractList$1.next(AbstractList.java:354)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.updateBullets(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.runTurn(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.runRound(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:743)

...

java.lang.NullPointerException
   at robocode.battle.Battle.updateBullets(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.runTurn(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.runRound(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.battle.Battle.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:743)

...

Exception in thread "sul.Pinkbot 1.1" java.lang.NullPointerException
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.setEnergy(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.setEnergy(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:743)
Exception in thread "serenity.moonlightBat 1.17" java.lang.NullPointerException
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.setEnergy(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.setEnergy(Unknown Source)
   at robocode.peer.RobotPeer.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:743)

Though if a workaround can be found for those issues (most likely bugs in the version of GNU Classpath in question. May not apply to newer versions, or a patched robocode might be able to work around it), it may work. Not sure that'll be possible though. Oh well... --Rednaxela 03:54, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Rumble Computers

I'm curious, what kind of computers are people using for roborumble? Voidious and Simonton seem to really have some nice ones I think. Personally the computers I have avaliable to run rumble consist of:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 (1.73GHz), 2GB ram, laptop, usually avaliable
• AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB ram, often avaliable
• AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB ram, rarely avaliable

I would also have my wimpy iPod were it not for one little bug preventing successful running of bots in the VM installed there. Sometimes... I'm really tempted to get a brand new shiney quad core monster for the sole purpose of storing backups, and running RoboRumble/Research :) --Rednaxela 03:41, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I have:

• MacBook 2.0 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, and I can run two clients on it safely. It's actually 3+ years old, but it holds up pretty well.
• AMD 2000+, 768MB RAM (Ubuntu 8.10), which I've been running a rumble client on almost 24/7 for a while now.
• Just yesterday, I ordered a MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM. So that will more than double my total rumble power, I think. =)

I wonder what Corbos had, I couldn't have kept up with him if I tried when he was rumbling recently. I've also been tempted many times to spring for a quad core Linux box just for Robocode, but so far I've been able to resist... (mmm, quad core...) --Voidious 03:55, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Haha... I unfortuantely can't run two clients on my Core 2 Duo laptop... the CPU just plain gets too hot. What I really want to see though, is MXThreadBean timing in a new robocode version, which would make it safe to enable the option to allow robots to run concurrently, when in rumble... Then one could take advantage of a 8 beast when running melee rumble with only one client... --Rednaxela 04:29, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

My client runs on an old laptop -- all it does is run roborumble + meleerumble:

• Intel Pentium M w/512MB ram, 100% available

Occasionally I press my main machine (MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo, 3GB) into service, but mostly I need it for work or running RoboResearch (that's what it's doing right now, in fact). It's also where the development rumble server lives, so this client is normally pointed at that anyway. Running both I was able to keep ahead of GrubbmGait for awhile until Voidious et al made our upload counts look puny by comparison. --Darkcanuck 04:26, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

My client is a 2.66 Mhz Pentium4 (single-core) with 1GB. There was a time that I ran roborumble on a 400Mhz laptop with 128Mb using robocode 1.0.7. Btw, Darkcanuck, are you able to remove (or rename) those somewhat embarrasing contributions of GrubbmGait_15x and GrubbmGait_17x at the very low bottom. --GrubbmGait 11:08, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Wow, 2.66 MHz!!?! :-D J/k. --Voidious 15:04, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

It's done. I merged GrubbmGait_15x into GrubbmGait_154, and removed the lone battle from GrubbmGait_17x (the upload still shows up, merged into GrubbmGait). --Darkcanuck 17:38, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

When I used to run it, I ran it on my Intel Centrino 2 P8400 2.26GHz with 4GB of RAM (but with 32bits OS it only sees 3GB) laptop, which I used for other works too. The time I run I only use FF to surf the web, but now I need to use Photoshop, Eclipse, LAMP and one virtual machine almost all the time so it doesn't available anymore. » Nat | Talk » 11:31, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I run my client in a Pentiun Dual Core 1.86 GHz, and I usualy run 2 clients, but right now I'm using it to test several new versions of my robot, so the rumble has to wait...--Navajo 14:36, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Lower Rank Limit?

Wouldn't it be reasonable to remove bots that gets negative ELO Rating (i.e elvbot.ElverionBot(ELO: -191.0) & ry.Worst 1.0 (ELO: -365.3) ) ?

They almost always score 0% and uses cpu-time while they contribute with near to nothing. --Rsim 15:37, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Whoops

Err... sorry my client reactivated some old melee bots due to old data lying around, seems they crave pairings now... plus a large number of recently released melee bots... means sloooow melee right now... --Rednaxela 05:10, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Iteration

I wonder if this happen to everyone or just me. When I run RoboRumble client, both 1.6.1.4 (which upload to darkcanuck's server) and 1.7.1.4 (which I use to test locally because it is faster), I found that after iteration 80 things got slower. I mean with 1.6.1.4 I can run 100 iteration in 4 hours, then another 4 hours it can run only 50-60 iterations. SO I tend to restart my client every 80 iterations. (and cool my hard disk down a little, it is around 80 degree Celcius when I run it for 150 iterations) Do anyone, especially who run RoboRumble overnight, have similar situation? --Nat Pavasant 03:10, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I've found that 1.6.1.4 still seems to have some long-term memory leakage actually. Not as bad as older version, but enough that it's still worth not using the ITERATE option actually. --Rednaxela 03:54, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

JVM Crash

After running the RoboRumble client (1.6.1.4) for about 12 hours, my JRE crashed. I have not been able to reproduce the problem, but I thought I'd post about here in the event it has happened to someone before. I've submitted a bug report to Sun and saved the logs [Here]. It may not be relevant, but this happened when evaluating Krabb.sliNk.Garm 0.9u. --Christopher.Hilla 22:06, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Huh... that's a very peculiar bug. I doubt there's anything more to it other than there being a bug in the JVM though, assuming this isn't something you're able to repeat reliably. --Rednaxela 22:48, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Contributor's Sum

I started contributing less than 30 days ago, yet my "All time" and Monthly sums don't match. My "All time" sum is much larger than what I've actually contributed. Even though my point tally is sort of like keeping score on "Whose Line Is It Anyway", it's worth mentioning :) --Christopher.Hilla 06:49, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

The monthly and 30-day totals are based on battles, whereas the all-time list is number of uploads. For a 1v1 battle between megas there is only one upload, but for smaller classes there will be one upload per size class (e.g. two nanos will generate 4 uploads). Melee is even more complicated since a full set of pairings for 10 megas will yield 45 uploads, even more if there are smaller bots in the mix. So your all-time uploads should be greater than the sum of the battles you've contributed so far. --Darkcanuck 07:41, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. --Christopher.Hilla 19:49, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Incomplete robot list

Hey Darkcanuck, I 've been running a few rumbles..and noticed I am missing a large number of bots " can't file specified file". Any Suggestions? Thx.. oh , I should mention Last night while Running an iteration envolving DR3.06 , Portia and 8 other bots. Something probably on my end screwwing up results for 1 battle. Not sure how, or why, but just one battle. -Jlm0924 20:06, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

DogmanSPE

I just ran a few tests to try and figure out the discrepancy between 1.8.0 and 1.8.2 of DrussGT, and now I can't repeat 1.8.0's results against DogmanSPE. I then decided to try a few rounds against Diamond 1.5.5, and it seems he also isn't living up to the scores he's getting on the rumble against DogmanSPE. The only thing I can think of is that it may be different versions of Robocode, as I'm doing my testing with 1.7.2b2. Any ideas? Maybe Dogman gets smart only at certain times of day? --Skilgannon 15:06, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Eh, DogmanSPE is a major troublemaker and always has been. It sometimes doesn't crash, but when it does crash it crashes for every subsequent round of the battle. This makes it's results always unpredictable. It doesn't affect overall APS too badly because of the sheer number of bots, but it's probably the single worst offender in the rumble. Issues with DogmanSPE have been pointed out before. Personally, I'm in favor of removing DogmanSPE. --Rednaxela 15:25, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

So am I. Anyone object? --Voidious 17:28, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Done =) --Skilgannon 19:17, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

LRP

Perhaps we should have a section on what the LRP does. I mean most of use from the old wiki know but... Anyway in the words of Paul,

May seems a stupid question, but, what is the blue line, and the 4 quadrants?
I can guess that on the X axis there is the expected score and on the Y the difference between expected and actual score.
But what the blue line is supposed to mean? -- [[Simonech]]

You are correct on the X axes and Y axes scales - the Blue line is a best-fit straight line through the data. if it has a negative
gradient slopes downhill (left to right) I believe it would indicate that the movement for the bot is stronger than the gun. A
positive gradient would indicate a good gun is being let down by relativley poor movement. -- [[Paul]]

— Chase-san 04:55, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Rumble use of 1.7.2.1 Beta?

Guys, do you think that Robocode 1.7.2.1 will be good enough to replace the very old 1.6.1.4 for RoboRumble? If not, what must be done? --Fnl 22:06, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

The main problem I have with 1.7.2.1 is that objects from the data section in jars from inside zips at least do not get extracted to the cache. I also have problems with duplicate robots in the repository (mostly only ones on the development path). — Chase-san 00:57, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Huh, I was under the impression that the data files were extracted properly still. (note, it's technically not a robotcache anymore). Also, what do you mean by duplicate robots, and is this different than older versions? --Rednaxela 05:30, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, I haven't noticed any new problems myself, but I've yet to have a chance to test very extensively, but I plan to on what is a long weekend coming up here. I'm going to clear my localhost rumble server and re-run testing with the latest version. Does anyone thing it would be good if I opened up the 1.7.2.1 testing rumble server to the world so others could speed up the process of testing it? --Rednaxela 05:30, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be good. I am more than willing help you. If not due the stability of internet connection of my server I would open a testing server ages ago (well, my server located at my school in the university's infrastructure which is like twenty years old or more). Just a side note, 1.7.1.x runs at least five times faster than 1.6.1.4. --Nat Pavasant 12:51, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Okay. I will wait a little with releasing 1.7.2.1 so you guys get the chance of testing it a bit more. 1.7.2.1 is "just" replacing the Jikes compiler with ECJ + some bug fixes compared to 1.7.2.0. I have started working on the 1.7.2.2 with some new features + I try to improve the speed with loading/updating the development paths, which are loaded extremely slow compared to the .jar files. :-) --Fnl 19:57, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Alright, I just moved the bots that are known to not work in 1.7 for "WontFix" reasons out of the participants list. Anybody mind? I kept them on the bottom of the pages with links to the SF ticket that's relevant. --Rednaxela 20:46, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I now have a rumble test server facing the world on [[1]]. It should be secured and fast enough now, I think. Feel free to run 1.7.2.1 Beta clients on it for testing! :) --Rednaxela 21:56, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

I have my roborumble and meleerumble client pointed to your server now. --Nat Pavasant 13:29, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Red, do you have any comparing method planned? The melee is almost completed, though it should need more before becoming stable. --Nat Pavasant 14:48, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

My current comparing plan is:

1. First look for obvious outliers (things missing from high ranks, things at extreme low ranks)
2. Then import the 1.6.1.4 rumble and 1.7.2.1 rumble results tables into a spreadsheet, sort each by name, line them up beside eachother, create a column for rank difference and PL difference, then sort by those to find outliers.
3. Test any outliers. Determine if it's a bug to report, or the bot doing something that it shouldn't

Currently, 1v1 rumble has two outliers at the bottom. I already reported the bug for one and it was fixed, and I think the other is breaking due to using File IO without using the proper robocode streams. About to do the spreadsheet with melee :) --Rednaxela 02:13, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

The biggest melee outliers by APS. Positive numbers mean improvement:

	Rank change	APS change
jab.DiamondStealer 5	145	20.07
gg.Squaraus 0.6	-72	-14.08
com.syncleus.robocode.Dreadnaught 0.1	49	9.40
stelo.Spread 0.2	62	6.34
bayen.nut.Squirrel 1.615	48	4.36
stelo.Moojuk 1.3	10	3.95
stelo.SoJNanoMelee 1.1	-23	-2.95
exauge.GateKeeper 1.1.121g	21	2.37
sgp.JollyNinja 3.53	18	2.12
lrem.micro.SpikeSoldier 0.4	19	2.00
sample.TrackFire 1.0	-0	-1.87

I suspect DiamondStealer may have had bad results on the main rumble server, and I suspect the APS differences below 3% are probably a fluke. Maybe some of the larger are too, but I plan to test Squaraus and Dreadnaught anyway. --Rednaxela 05:16, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Dreadnaught also had bad results in the beginning (not complient to 1.5.4 I believe) --GrubbmGait 08:49, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

.NET

Is it possible to submit robots written in .NET to RoboRumble? --dserbia 15:18, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

No, not at the moment. We have to make sure Robocode 1.7.x reach the really stable phase before. And I think we should wait for jni4net to reach at least beta status, for Mono support. Many of high-contributing RoboRumble clients are running under either Linux or OSX. --Nat Pavasant 15:38, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply! --dserbia 17:21, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I'm not sure I'd ever be in favor of allowing them into the rumble. There would then be bots in the rumble that Mac/Linux users could never test against (and there are a lot of us), and it would also make us dependent on .NET users to contribute battles for those bots when we post new versions of our own. But I do sympathize - if/when more .NET Robocoders come onto the scene, things could change.

Keep in mind that all of this stuff is community driven, though it may all seem very "official" to a newcomer. Anyone is free to setup a competition / tournament / rumble that includes .NET bots if they want! We've had tournament style competitions like the MiniBot Challenge and Twin Duel in the past, Robocode has APIs that make automating battles for tourneys fairly easy, and Darkcanuck posts the source to his rumble server somewhere (Nat or Rednaxela would know). And there's always Challenges you can compete in, too.

--Voidious 17:38, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

I think Pavel Savara has plan for suporting jni4net, which is the core of .NET Robocode, on Mono, which can be run under Linux and Mac OS X. I don't think there is a valid reason for not supporting those when that day come. --Nat Pavasant 06:57, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it could work out, but there's still lots of room for issues. How stable is Mono? Will Mono add behavior discrepancies to .NET bots? Or will Java bots hit subtle behavior discepancies when battling .NET bots on Windows? (Either of those could be very hard to debug for the bot author.) Will .NET bots run much slower when running through Mono? Will that count against them in terms of CPU time/skipped turns? We've seen plenty of issues just from different JVMs / CPUs / OSes, so adding Mono and .NET to the rumble definitely requires caution. Or it may work perfectly smoothly and we'll all coexist peacefully. =) --Voidious 15:18, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

As long as one isn't doing GUI or calls to native libraries (not allowed for bots anyway), I'm pretty sure Mono is quite accurately compatible, however my concerns are around the fairness issues. x86 Java is reasonably uniform in terms of what parts of the code get optimized how well by the JVM. As I understand, Mono's performance is pretty reasonable overall, however since it's coded from scratch it's optimization characteristics are notably different I think, which makes cpu fairness somewhat tricky for having MS .Net and Mono running the same rumble. If one looks at this, it's fairly old, but shows large performance differences going either way in terms of different types of operations. That exact issue only becomes larger between the JVM and .NET, so I really do think it makes sense for .NET to be kept to a separate rumble (possibly on the same server but separated like the different formats?). --Rednaxela 19:23, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

New Rumble

Rednaxela and I have been talking a bit, and we have put considerable thought into a new 1-vs-1 rumble. Unlike our current 1-vs-1 rumble, this would have no data saving, be single round battles on a 800x800 field. Also considering having the game 'white out' names in a battle to just numbers, so there can be no hard-coded specific bot data saving either. I personally feel this kind of 1-vs-1 competition would allow for much greater competition from non-adaptive movements, and lower the bar considerably for newer robocoders. But not too much, since obviously, Crazy would never be able to win over DrussGT.

We also considered non-random starting positions (for greater fairness) and a 4 bot single round melee on the same field size.

— Chase-san 16:16, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I think this would be a really neat thing to have. Now, I don't think it should replace the old-style rumble, but I think it would make a very interesting competition, and perhaps much less daunting for newcomers. And to clarify on what the "white out" of names, it means robot names that bots would see would just be like "1", "2", "3", or perhaps "robot 1", "robot 2", "robot 3". Now, that does require a modification to Robocode, but I think it would probably be relatively simple and quick to get implemented. (I say it should be simple because Robocode already alters names when multiple of the same bot are in a battle, so I'd imagine the same code path can be reused, so just a matter of changing it for a certain rumble flag) --Rednaxela 16:27, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

We have put togeather a seed of 60 robots, please keep in mind this is just a seed, and you can add your own robots when it gets started. This is just to round out the robots so that we can get some meaningful rankings.

abc.Tron 2.02
ags.micro.Carpet 1.1
ags.polished.PolishedRuby 1
apv.Aspid 1.7
apv.NanoLauLectrik 1.0
apv.ScruchiPu 1.0
ary.nano.AceSurf 1.2
axeBots.Musashi 2.18
axeBots.Okami 1.04
chase.pm.Pytko 1.0
cjm.Che 1.2
cx.Lacrimas 1.36
cx.mini.Cigaret 1.31
darkcanuck.Gaff 1.50
davidalves.net.DuelistMini 1.1
davidalves.net.DuelistNano 1.0
dummy.micro.Sparrow 2.5
gh.GrubbmGrb 1.2.4
gh.GrypRepetyf 0.13
jam.mini.Raiko 0.43
jk.micro.Toorkild 0.2.4b
kawigi.robot.Girl 1.2
kawigi.sbf.FloodHT 0.9.2
kawigi.sbf.FloodSonnet 0.9
kc.micro.Needle 0.101
kc.micro.Thorn 1.252
kc.mini.Vyper 0.311
kc.nano.Splinter 1.2
kid.Gladiator .7.2
Krabb.krabby2.Krabby2 1.9o
mld.Moebius 2.9.3
mue.Hyperion 0.8
mz.NanoDeath 2.56
pe.SandboxDT 3.02
pe.SandboxLump 1.52
pedersen.Ugluk 1.0
pez.mako.Mako 1.5
pez.mini.Tityus 0.9.1
pez.mini.VertiLeach 0.4.0
ry.VirtualGunExperiment 1.2.0
rz.Aleph 0.34
rz.GlowBlowAPM 1.0
sample.Walls
sample.Crazy
simonton.beta.LifelongObsession 0.5.1
simonton.micro.GFMicro 1.0
simonton.micro.WeeklongObsession 3.4.1
simonton.nano.WeekendObsession_S 1.7
stefw.Tigger 0.0.23
synapse.Geomancy 15
techdude.Carruthers 1.2.6
tzu.TheArtOfWar 1.2
voidious.micro.Jen 1.11
vuen.Fractal 0.55
wcsv.Engineer.Engineer 0.5.4
whind.Strength 0.6.4
wiki.BasicGFSurfer 1.02
wiki.mini.Sedan 1.0
wiki.nano.RaikoNano 1.1
zyx.micro.Ant 1.1

— Chase-san 17:36, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

1.7.x rumble eventually...

Hey guys... I kind of think I dropped the ball on working on getting 1.7.x to main rumble before... but I still think it would be good to eventually. Now... unlike before (where the rumble server was a little VM on my machine that I sometimes had to shut down for lack of memory), I have a more proper server I could use for rumble. I probably won't get around to setting this up till after winter holidays (have plans with family), but just wanted to ask, how much interest in this is there? Best Regards. --Rednaxela 07:29, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I am still interested in. Right now (well, not really, since I am not actively writing robots), my movement predictor have flags for 1.6.1.4 or 1.7.1.3+ movement. Since rumble runs 1.6.1.4 but 1.7.x+ runs much faster. Also, the whole rumble would take less time to stabilised (but it would put more load to server, since client can run, as Pavel claimed, ten times faster. --Nat Pavasant 11:36, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm still interested. Kept meaning to ask you why the test rumble server went down but never did. Do you still have all the results, or would we start from scratch? Anyway, it would be good to be current. A lot of new people get 0 scores because they use new APIs, plus there's the performance benefits. --Voidious 14:00, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I do still have the old data, but I'm not sure we want to use it. Presumably we'd want to test now with the very latest version, and mixing the results in this of multiple versions in this test could cloud results. --Rednaxela 14:59, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Alright! I have a new rumble test server up and running at http://rednaxela-robocode.dyndns.org/rumble/. For ease of use, rumble configuration templates are linked from it's main page. Also, if you want, here's a convenient zip of all the bots currently in rumble: [2]. This one is located on a more proper type of server, rather than a virtual machine on my laptop. So... time to get testing 1.7.2.2 and prove it stable? :) --Rednaxela 06:37, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Hm, I thought I had this page "watched" but it looks like I've missed a lot... Is the new server running the same code and database schema as the current one? --Darkcanuck 06:43, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Yep, same code and database schema. The only changes I made were to the front html page, and changing the accepted version of robocode to 1.7.2.2. --Rednaxela 06:57, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

I found my old laptop, I will set it to run, I might tweak the CPU constant up a little too, since it is a older/slower machine. (I will just set it in my closet, away from hustle and bustle). — Chase-san 09:32, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Nice! I'll start running my clients against this again. Thanks Rednaxela! Btw, the superpack .zip is gone from RoboRumble/Starting With RoboRumble. I'll make a new one with the above archive unless you could just repost the old one. --Voidious 14:47, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

It turns out both my laptops puked at some point while I was out (one locked up while loading rankings, the other I forgot to make a loop and iterate was NOT). Not sure if you still have to do iterate not, and make a script loop, but I did. Only my main system had kept running the rumble. But I restarted both of those now. — Chase-san 02:36, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

As far as I know, all the memory leaks have been fixed. I had my client run over the whole day and the memory use plateaued nicely with no issues whatsoever. --Rednaxela 02:39, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah well, I will switch them to use ITERATE then. Thanks. — Chase-san 02:59, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Is there anything that we're waiting on for the switch to the 1.7 rumble rankings? I'd love to help make this upgrade happen. Ncj 16:45, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I know Rednaxela was investigating some of the outliers from the test server's rankings. I'm not sure there was really anything "stop ship" though. I think the rankings look pretty good. Rednaxela, what do you think? --Voidious 20:38, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, here's the "Table of Anomalous Results" I made when the 1.7.2.2 rumble first stabilized:

	Old Rank	Old %	New Rank	New %	Rank Diff	% Diff		ABS % Diff	ABS Rank Diff	Explanation
CharlieN.Omega.Omega 1.03	319	55.29	774	9.19	-455	-46.1		46.1	455	tracker item 3207405
NDH.GuessFactor 1.0	787	0.42	578	39.54	209	39.12		39.12	209	uses post-1.6.1.4 functions
jeremyreeder.Vincent 2011.12.09	788	0	645	33.68	143	33.68		33.68	143	uses post-1.6.1.4 functions
Krabb.krabby2.Krabby2 1.9o	71	73.63	528	43.12	-457	-30.51		30.51	457
gg.Squaraus 0.6	714	26.3	786	4.62	-72	-21.68		21.68	72	tracker item 3207405
elvbot.ElverionBot 0.3	785	0.72	751	19.75	34	19.03		19.03	34	uses post-1.6.1.4 functions
TJ.Exupery 1.39	403	50.02	174	63.3	229	13.28		13.28	229
zh.UnderDog 0.0.2	782	4.31	762	14.11	20	9.8		9.8	20	1 on 5 exception in TacticalAdvisor in 1.6.1.4
reaper.Reaper 1.1	357	53.1	194	62.6	163	9.5		9.5	163	crashes on some clients in 1.6.14 but not 1.7?
sm.Devil 7.3	517	44.13	351	53.45	166	9.32		9.32	166	crashes on some clients in 1.6.14 but not 1.7?
xiongan.Xiongan 1.1	709	27.05	614	36.22	95	9.17		9.17	95
ag.Gir 0.99	762	13.25	739	22.26	23	9.01		9.01	23

The case of "CharlieN.Omega.Omega 1.03" was tracker item 3207405, and has been fixed in 1.7.3.0 Beta. Unfortunately I've yet to investigate the other results.

Some of positive results I suspect may have been from using some Robocode 1.7 features perhaps (i.e. some new events). The case of Krabby2 I in particular mean to investigate because that result looks quite odd. Some other positive changes like Devil seem strange to me, because Devil predates Robocode 1.7 by a huge margin, yet seems to do better than in 1.6 by a notable margin. I've yet to be able to figure that out either. Anyone have any theories or can look into these cases?

Anyway, presuming these issues can be worked out, what do people think of moving straight to 1.7.3.0 perhaps? The difference relative to 1.7.2.2 is small so I don't see it as that high risk, and if it turns out there were issues, then we're no worse off than if we had spent the same effort to test 1.7.3.0. Thoughts?

--Rednaxela 04:45, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

SmallDevil crashes on my clients (dunno about others), so his 1.6 score is probably just wrong. I'm probably OK with moving to 1.7.3.0, but I'd prefer to just go with 1.7.2.2 since that's the one we've actually spent so much time testing. The difference being small could support either decision. =) 1.7.3.0 is still beta, too. --Voidious 12:44, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, of course some testing of 1.7.3.0 needs to be done, but that should be possible to complete before it's out of beta. I think it's changes from 1.7.2.2 are definitely seem small enough to me that it's not like we need to do a full rumble run again. --Rednaxela 13:23, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

The three bots 'NDH.Guessfactor', 'jeremyreeder.Vincent' and elvbot.ElverionBot' all use post-1.6.1.4 functions, no further investigation needed for them. SmallDevil indeed occasionally crashes, why it does not do that on 1.7.2.2 I don't know. I believe the same goes for 'reaper.Reaper'. Friday I will have some time to check other differences. Is there a possibility to check all '2100-0' scores on the server for a specific bot? A bad client on the moment of submission has a permanent influence now. On the old server (years ago) these bad results faded away with each new battle (0.7*0.7*0.7 etc). --GrubbmGait 18:35, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I suspect SmallDevil just crashes due to some corrupt saved data, tho I haven't investigated it. I've seen the same with other bots, like TheBrainPi. I wiped my robotcache today so I'll watch out for SmallDevil battles from me with any new bot releases. --Voidious 00:30, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Interesting. Tomorrow I think I'll be able to look into these more, especially Krabby2 I think. --Rednaxela 05:00, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

For reaper.Reaper and sm.Devil just check their scores against ad.last.Bottom. There is the possibility that these bots still could crash in 1.7, as it only happens occasionally. Is there a way to reject/ignore 21xx-0 scores (if other scores are available) and scores way outside the normal range? That would be like an aspirine for the ranking. See example below. --GrubbmGait 14:18, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

BATTLE DETAILS FOR "reaper.Reaper 1.1" VS "abud.ThirdRobo 1.0" IN GAME "roborumble"

|% Score |% Survival |score |bullet dmg. |survival |score |bullet dmg. |survival |Battle Time             |Submitted by 
|                    | reaper.Reaper 1.1           | abud.ThirdRobo 1.0          |
|90.622  |100.000    |5991  |3233        |35       |620   | 614        | 0       |2010-05-31 12:57:18:835 |cberendt@178.63.10.12 ver.1.6.1.4 
|90.927  |100.000    |5963  |3215        |35       |595   | 590        | 0       |2010-02-09 07:49:56:713 |Miked0801@207.170.253.83 ver.1.6.1.4 
|90.044  |100.000    |5960  |3209        |35       |659   | 657        | 0       |2010-01-06 02:27:33:942 |darkcanuck@24.85.46.67 ver.1.6.1.4 
|89.834  |100.000    |5956  |3200        |35       |674   | 667        | 0       |2009-01-15 16:51:12:182 |darkcanuck_154@24.85.45.250 ver.1 
|90.435  |100.000    |5928  |3187        |35       |627   | 622        | 0       |2008-09-10 15:49:11:187 |ABC@import ver.1 
|88.993  | 97.143    |5862  |3179        |34       |725   | 643        | 1       |2008-09-21 12:06:41:943 |ABC@import ver.1 
|0.000   |  0.000    |   0  |0           | 0       |2103  |   0        |35       |2010-11-09 13:21:30:209 |Voidious@76.15.102.168 ver.1.6.1.4 
|0.000   |  0.000    |   0  |0           | 0       |2101  |   0        |35       |2010-07-04 13:50:23:859 |Voidious@76.15.102.168 ver.1.6.1.4 
|0.000   |  0.000    |   0  |0           | 0       |2101  |   0        |35       |2009-10-13 23:34:34:50  |Voidious@173.50.167.108 ver.1.6.1.4 
|0.016   |  0.000    |   1  |0           | 0       |6179  |3395        |35       |2008-10-29 04:30:08:727 |darkcanuck@24.85.45.250 ver.1

I think we could wait for Version 1.7.3.1 is out of beta and use that for its bug fixes (or just go with 1.7.3.0). It is kind of silly to still be using a version for the rumble that is nearly 3 years old, it is unlikely we are ever going to get a `perfect` version. Also might be able to eventually get .Net bots into the rumble. — Chase-san 11:09, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree, we should do a switch. The new Robocode runs a lot faster, meaning faster updates on battles for any given number of clients. Moreover, there are a lot of bots that don't work on older versions due to painting methods etc that have been added in the latest Robocodes. Also, using the latest Robocode version makes it easier for beginners to contribute to rumble as well as submit their bots. I haven't seen any widespread change in scores, the problems all seem to be due to individual bots having bad programming practices or being buggy. About .Net bots in the rumble, AFAIK there is no way to run .Net reliably on Linux, which is how I (and many others) run rumble clients, but having an up-to-date client is certainly the first step. What think ye, people? --Skilgannon 12:28, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

So, lets do it already. If we just don't do it it will never happen! After that we can maybe try to talk again about trimming the participant list, mostly because I think it really needs to happen eventually. Cause as things are going in 2046, we have 2900 participants, we still haven't trimmed the list and are running a robocode version from 2016. ;) — Chase-san 15:18, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

My only concern about 1.7.x on RoboRumble is server load. 1.7.x runs much faster than the older versions. About .NET, I think Pavel is still working on jni4net on Mono, but it is not stable nor usable as far as I know. And the main .NET is still in alpha. It would be long time before .NET robot can run on RoboRumble. --Nat Pavasant 12:46, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed, let's do it. The test rumble server results looked very good. But we might have to wait until Darkcanuck says he has time to oversee it in case there are any issues. Agree on leaving out .Net and disagree on trimming participants list... 4x the participants in 35 years when we have 1,000,000x the processing power doesn't seem like a problem. =) And maybe by then we will have moved to Robocode 2 anyway. :-P --Voidious 16:09, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

You forget that robots get more complex as time passes. ;) — Chase-san 17:28, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Let's switch. What about the current results, are they kept or dismissed. I think with the switch from 1.5.4 to 1.6.1.4 we kept all scores. Only the problembots listed above need some attention in that case. Next to this switch, maybe it's time to create a new division: Robots, and move the 'Extend Robot' ones to that place. It depends a bit if can be distinguished if a bot is a Robot or an AdvancedRobot though. It should help in two ways, first Robots finally have their own ranking and can be compared, second the 1v1 becomes a bit less crowded (although that does not seem to be very annoying right now). --GrubbmGait 17:42, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I am pretty sure the number of "Extends Robot" robots is proportionally small. Being generous, maybe 120 of them at most. — Chase-san 17:47, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Like the previous switch, the server should temporary accept 2 versions of clients for the rumble. And I agree with Voidious that Darkcanuck should have some time to monitor the switch. And regarding a 'Robots' division, many robocoders start with ExtendsRobot as part of a (school)project or because they think it is easier :-P . Teamrumble and Twinduel do not have many participants either, although it is true those are very different than 1v1 --GrubbmGait 17:54, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

So it sounds like we're ready to add 1.7.3.0 to the approved list? The change is easy for me and I should have enough time to keep an eye on the server for the next week or two. 1.6.1.4 will still be allowed for a short period, but I think it would be good to disable it soon (because of bot compatibility). And if 1.7.3.1 looks good it shouldn't be such a big deal to add it in soon (ie. don't need to wait 2 years!). --Darkcanuck 19:23, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I say go for it. Having looked at the code, I know you use an array for the version checks. (should put that into the config!) — Chase-san 20:08, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm definitely in support of moving to 1.7.3. Also, a couple comments on other aspects of the conversation:
- About .NET, I think that even when there are no technical issues to running it with the roborumble client, it would be best kept in it's own rumble league. I say this because I doubt there cpu constant fairness could really be achieved.
- About the concern of server load that Nat mentioned, I know that my 1.7 roborumble test server held up just fine with a peak of many more clients than the main rumble server has ever had to cope with (thanks to Chase-San :)), and there wasn't really a problem. I'm not sure what Darkcanuck is running, but my test server is running on a quaint 128MB RAM VPS even (fitting mysql on that, while having some headroom, requires some performance compromises)
--Rednaxela 00:27, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I think the bigger issue in that case was bandwidth rather then server load, them having used up something around 40% or 60% of its pipe (I forget). In case your wondering, I ran around 16 high end i7s, each with 4 clients, all at once. — Chase-san 01:12, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

The bottleneck on my 1.7 test server wasn't bandwidth. Note, my VPS has successfully pulled from kernel.org at over 600Mbit before, and reliably gets over 100Mbit. So... bandwidth is not an issue. I believe the bottleneck was to do with the MySQL server. The main ways to fix it would involve it eating more memory really. --Rednaxela 05:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Re: server load, I'll keep an eye on it. The bottleneck is the huge size of the database: I suppose if a lot of old pairings were pruned out that would probably help (indexes would stand a better chance of not getting swapped out to disk). Or if I had a bit more memory I'd put the entire pairings table into Redis and the rumble server would be screaming fast. Right now there are just too many bots! --Darkcanuck 02:10, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to shut down the server in an hour or two, backup the database and then bring it back online with 1.7.3.0 uploads enabled. Then we'll need someone to test it... --Darkcanuck 02:10, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

It's done. Any volunteers to test this? --Darkcanuck 03:59, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

YAHOOOOO!!!!!!:) I run 1.7.3 client soon --Jdev 05:09, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Done. --Jdev 05:17, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

And NDH.Guessfactor 1.0 gets its first real score ... --Darkcanuck 05:29, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Starting a 1.7.3.0 client here --Rednaxela 05:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Started a client here, just one though. Might setup a deticated box at some point. Also in a month or two we can probably flush all the older 1.6.1.4 pairings. — Chase-san 12:52, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I'll start a client tonight. About flushing the 1.6.1.4 pairings, why should that be done. That just means that a lot of valid information and info of older botversions is lost. Removing older invalid results (210x-000x scores) is usefull, but that should be an automated task. A point of discussion could be whether versions that are retired for more than x years (f.e 3 years), should be moved to another (inactive) database. In that case the 'running' database will not grow that fast. --GrubbmGait 13:39, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, I'm not planning on flushing anything. But it might be helpful to re-release some of the bots which used to crash under 1.6.1.4 so that they get a valid ranking (and give predictable results to their opponents) if their authors are still around or someone is willing to update the packages. Purging old pairing data (for retired bots only) might be nice for performance reasons, but the downside is that you lose comparison information so I'm not keen on that either. People have donated *years* of cpu time to build up the current database! --Darkcanuck 13:51, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Maybe a good "flushing old data" strategy, would when calculating pairings, don't count battles from old versions if there are at least 3 battles of the pairing with the new version? It seems to me this would: 1) not be too hard to implement, 2) would phase out results that were bad with the old version without needing re-release of bots, and 3) be rather seamless in that it wouldn't immediately be tossing old version results out. --Rednaxela 14:11, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Good points all around, what was I thinking? — Chase-san 14:13, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

It's an interesting idea but I have two concerns: 1) only a handful of bots have different results between versions, it seems wasteful to throw out perfectly good 1.6.1.4 battles (considering some pairings have a high APS variance) when we could just re-release the problem bots; 2) the pairing update is done incrementally so it currently doesn't query battle data, which could be fairly expensive to add. --Darkcanuck 14:34, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm running some battles locally and noticed scoring 80% vs YersiniaPestis. This is actually with 1.7.2.2. I checked recent rumble results vs other top bots and found a 24% score vs DrussGT, which seems pretty unlikely: [3]. I'll look into it sometime, but in case anyone else gets a chance first... --Voidious 02:24, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

No problems with YersiniaPestis for me, well, GresSuffurd still loses. Could it be an OS/Java version problem? --GrubbmGait 08:08, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I've always seen wild scores with YersiniaPestis during testing (probably due to my gun's affinity for YP's movement) but I don't think that battle is too unusual. There's a similar score vs Pris: [4] (using 1.6.1.4). Checking its other close matchups, there's a lot of variability, often > 20% APS. --Darkcanuck 16:32, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Client on Google Apps Engine

I wonder, since the latest release of Google Apps Engine (1.5.0), Google add support for Backend, which allow process to run as long as you like. I think it is possible to port the RoboRumble@Home client to run on these environment; that would speed up the process. But I think we need to check if this is applicable with Google Apps Engine TOS and throttle the client enough so it doesn't use more than its free quota limit ;-) Just an idea! --Nat Pavasant 01:42, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, I'm pretty sure that even if you can run a process as long as you like, they don't guarantee a constant amount of available CPU, which is important for robocode. Of course, if in the future, robocode switches to using the less granular APIs that track actual cpu time used by given threads, then this would probably work. It's not really the same, but as a note, you can already run robocode on Amazon's EC2, which does guarantee a level of CPU allocation. Chase-san briefly tried this once in the past.--Rednaxela 02:51, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

But, of course, unless you already host something on EC2, the EC2 isn't "free" ;-) --Nat Pavasant 12:19, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

I've been running two instances of the client on the cheapest server offered by linode ($20/mo). I'd run more, as it's quad core, but it only has 500MB of RAM and is thus memory bound. I keep the box around in case I need to pretend my traffic is coming from the US, but for a dedicated RoboRumble box would EC2 end up being cheaper? Ncj 16:52, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

As an aside, I'd only recommend running one client with 500 megs of RAM, as I think other people use and test with 512. I remember the default was 512 in robocode.sh but still 256 in roborumble.sh at one point - not sure if that's been fixed. Pretty cool you do that, though! --Voidious 21:44, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Aside from agreeing with Voidious about wanting 500mb per client, I'd question whether the CPU allocation on linode is stable. Those are virtual machines shared with other instances, and while there are "four cores" that it has access to, it's not as if it's exclusive access. I'd be very concerned that your clients are causing bots to skip turns whenever other instances on the machine get busy. --Rednaxela 00:29, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

If Linode CPU's allocation isn't stable, then isn't the EC2. They are based on the same virtualization technology, Xen. I'd be more concerned if it is KVM or OpenVZ virtualization system. --Nat Pavasant 14:29, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It would all be a matter of how they configure it (i.e. cpu caps). EC2 is marketed for high performance computing purposes. I'm pretty sure caps cpu usage of instances so people never get more than they pay for, and also so it's possible for all instances to hit the cap without fighting for CPU. In contrast, I'm pretty sure Linode is markets their instances more for hosting purposes, and so I'd expect them to manage their caps differently such that when there are free cpu cycles an instance may use more than it would be able to if all instances were busy. Basically, the underlying technology (Xen) is the same, but as I understand, the type of service is fairly different. That said, I've personally not used either service, but from what I've read, this is my understanding of the two. --Rednaxela 23:22, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Is there a way for me to check this? Somehow compare the % of skipped turns on my client to someone else's? Ncj 15:36, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately no (at least not without modification to robocode). Actually... I kind of wish that Robocode would report "percent of turns skipped" to the roborumble server.... --Rednaxela 23:22, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Frequency of Submissions

I've been submitting a lot of updates to my robot lately. Is there any etiquette on how often is too often? I just want to make sure I'm not annoying anyone. I do expect my frequency of updates to slow dramatically soon. Thanks. Skotty 19:17, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

My view's pretty simple: as long as you're not delaying other bots from reaching a stable rating, release as often as you like! A bot without full pairings takes precedence over a bot under 2k battles, but a bot's rating isn't really stable until around 2k battles. So if my bot's at 800 and you keep releasing new versions, I'll never get to 2k. Personally, if this happened to me, I'd just temporarily exclude you on my clients, which seems fair to both of us. Pulling my weight in RoboRumble clients tends to alleviate any potential guilt, too. And FWIW, I've certainly done daily updates for long stretches (eg, Diamond/Version History and Komarious/Version History). --Voidious 19:42, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Robocode Repository Package

Hello everyone. Robocode Repository is still down for longer time again. Is there a possibility adding a packge with all of its actual robots from the rumble? The roborumble-superpack-20110123 package is great stuff, but does not contain all of the actual Robocode Repository robots. Thanks! --FromHell 14:48, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I zipped up all the JARs in my RoboRumble dir pretty recently, should have most of what you need: roborumble_bots.zip (69 MB). It also has lots of versions of many bots, so you might want to just grab what you need... It would indeed be good to update the superpack sometime. --Voidious 14:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Great! Thank you very much. Yes, updating the superpack would be good, because sometimes the stabilization of the rankings needs some time, because not every contributor has all bots, especially the ones missing from repository. Maybe I will update my local rumbleback the next days, after finishing my actual development on CHCl3. Normally I would publish the new superpack, but the only problem is, that my webspace is from a friend of mine and is very limited and he wants to change the provider in the next few months. So it's no good idea publishing it on "my" server. But it would work for a while. --FromHell 18:50, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I addad a package to my webspace with all missing Robocode Repository bots (for every category). roborumble_missing_bots_20110621.zip (275 KB). It would be great if someone would update the superpack with these bots and making it available for the whole community. Or should I add my link to the Starting With RoboRumble page at this wiki? --FromHell 09:54, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

ImWithStupidTeam

There seems to be a problem with ImWithStupidTeam. Executing the rumble will be canceled with the following message: "Aborting battle, could not find robot: pedersen.ImWithStupid 1.3". I had a closer look to the bot and there was still a jar file in the jar file. Taking the inner jar, adding the file ImWithStupidTeam.team to the jar, renaming the new jar to pedersen.ImWithStupidTeam_1.3.jar should just do the trick. Should this team be removed from the team rumble participants list? Found an entry to 1v1 list that there was also removed a bot, because it was wrong packaged. What is the right way? Thanks for your answers. --FromHell 10:30, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to MN for taking action at this point. --FromHell 21:00, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Running the rumble

I apologize but it is unlikely i'll be able to run the rumble this week. Forecast is all very high heat and high humidity. I personally do not want to run my system in the jungle. In fact so much so I cannot even use it, as it is off. — Chase-san 19:50, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I was following a policy of running clients non-stop until the rankings stabilize whenever I mess with the participants list myself. --MN 02:08, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Increase BATTLESPERBOT roborumble parameter

I think, that it is time to increase BATTLESPERBOT, beacuse current value gives ~2.4 battles against every but and this amount is too small to stabilise ratings
I increase BATTLESPERBOT to 4400 battles (~ 5.3 battles against each bot) and suggest to all do the same thing. Or counter arguments:) --Jdev 05:54, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's necessary. The latest updates to the server cause it to send out priority battles for any low matchups 50% of the time (which overrides the client's battles-per-bot processing). That should ensure pairings fill up fairly evenly. Extra priority is also given to pairings with < 2 battles, those are requested 100% of the time. I would be inclined to increase the 50% instead, if we all agree that even pairings are most important (I think they are). --Darkcanuck 06:05, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm Sorry, but because my english i can not understand following statements:

* "send out priority battles for any low matchups 50% of the time"?

* "Extra priority is also given to pairings with < 2 battles, those are requested 100% of the time."? Anyway, 2 battels is still too low. May be increase this value?

* "that even pairings are most important"

--Jdev 07:14, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I briefly described the new system here: Darkcanuck/RRServer/Updates. Every time you upload a result, the server decides whether or not to send your client a priority battle request (a single pairing that needs another battle). These priority battles get run first, then your client worries about the bots with battles < BATTLESPERBOT. Right now the server always sends a priority battle request if it sees a pairing with < 2 battles. Otherwise, 50% of the time it will send a request for a pairing that has a low battle count. The other 50% of the time, your client will choose what to run next. We could either increase the percentage or increase the < 2.

"that even pairings are most important" = trying to get all pairings to an equal number of battles is most important (in my opinion). --Darkcanuck 07:41, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, Darkcanuck! Now all things is clear for me. --Jdev 08:06, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

There was a discussion on Talk:Darkcanuck/RRServer/Query. The only disadvantage I see with making the priority system too deterministic is with the ELO and Glicko-2 rating systems. They are sensitive to battle ordering and work better with random pairings. Right now they are both stabilizing slower than the APS rating system. --MN 13:52, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

This kind of thing is why in the past I've argued in favor of having a rating system which is essentially APS, except uses Glicko-2 to estimate the score of missing pairings. I say this because it seems to me the only advantage of Glicko-2 over APS is in the incomplete pairing scenario, and one should be able to get the best of both worlds by just using Glicko-2 for estimation of missing pairings. --Rednaxela 14:18, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey, I've been trying to archive the RoboRumble rankings for a few days now, and the RoboRumble (General 1v1) and all four MeleeRumbles are still unstable. I haven't seen any new entrants. Is it common these days to go this long without having a stable ranking? And is it just a matter of people running clients? I tried to fix the problems I saw in the participants lists (based on the auto-tweeter's activity). I don't have a real client setup right now, or I'd run it myself.

Would you mind elaborating on "unstable ranking" definition?

I think there is only one new bot AgentSmith which is probably unsettled in ranking, but the were no new bots for months, so it should be ok otherwise.

Unfortunately, no one actively/constantly running rumbles. May be I should restart my clients...

Oh, I specifically mean that not all bots have faced each other. The LiteRumble rankings pages say so right at the top. (I think they're using the same definition as my archiving script...)

I see. the jcs.Decepticon 2.5.3 missing one battle in the rumble.

I was browsing LiteRumble and noticed the survival scores between Combat and LifelongObsession, FloodSonnet, HariSeldon, Prophet, RCBot are abnormally low.

If you look the opposite scores in the 5 opponent profiles, they are also low.

Ran the battles locally and the scores don't match.

Most likely the version of Robocode the server allows is out of date

The server doesn't use Robocode. It simply processes battle results sent by clients. Numbers from 0 to 35 in the case of survival scores.

I know the server throws results away sometimes. It records results on one side of the pairing, but not the other. In an attempt to decrease the number of database accesses and cloud service fees.

But it only reduces the amount of battles. Would explain a low number of battles, but not low scores on all battles.

Ran the battles locally using 1.9.2.3. Still the scores don't match.

Combat can work with much older versions too.

But why wrong scores with only a few pairings? Version issues usually affect the whole ranking.

There is a possibility that battle submitted client has different result when compared to your machine. For example less available memory or different java version. So if your algorithm is CPU intensive it might be forced into the "skip turn" regime and then score will be very low.

For the last year my machines were major battle submitters and I use to run them with old Java, so if yours was compiled with newer Java it would automatically lose, since it would not be able to fight.

I do not think that it is robocode version issue, but I recall that there we some glitches with reporting when we moved from 1.8 to 1.9. I think the only fix in 1.9.1 to 1.9.2 was in the score submission.

I just want to say thanks to everybody who has been contributing battles - the rumble has been *extremely* quick to stabilise over the last few days, and I've been making the most of it =)

I've also finally gotten around to banning 1.7.4.2 clients, so only 1.8.1.0 for the foreseeable future. Although from the looks of it, the meleerumble might need a reset, since Neuromancer 3.4 isn't stabilising anywhere near where it was before.

I can't promise that machine will always be available for RoboRumble clients, but it has been lately and I'm certainly happy to contribute. :-)

Hi Skilgannon, I am newbe with Robocode. I tried to run a client with Robocode 1.9.1.0, it succesfully take 50 battles, but when trying to upload results, it receive the message: "OK. CLIENT NOT SUPPORTED. Use one of: [1.8.1.0, 1.8.2.0]

not 1.9.1.0. What am I doing wrong?. Thanks in advance for your help.

Yarhoslavme, for now, the only way to contribute is to comply with a message and use robocode version either 1.8.1.0 or 1.8.2.0

But where do you get 1.8.2.0 or 1.8.1.0

Dan Lynn posted on a G+ post that the repository is coming back up: [1]

For me it did. It's running fine after a bad crash for months.

Could someone please explain me what the difference between the normal client (found in robocode/robocode.bat ) and the Roborumble Superpack (found at http://robowiki.net/wiki/RoboRumble/Starting_With_RoboRumble#With_the_Roborumble_Superpack ) are. Is the second one better ,faster? Everytime I try to download the superpack from the wiki I get a Dropbox 404 error ,so I downloaded it somewhere else, but after I unzipped it , I only found roborumble.sh and twinduel.sh. I have some Linux distrutions installed on my system, but I almost never use them. So where can I get a superpack for Windows? Thank you.

You can just use a normal Robocode install, then copy all of the bots from [1] into the robots directory.

I just did a head-count on the number of robots in each rumble (of only that weight class).

Which comes to this: 458 megabots 132 minibots 170 microbots 229 nanobots

I found that interesting, that there we're fewer mini and microbots then nanobots. Maybe a microbot (>250 + <750) only or minibot only (>750 + <1500) rumble would make those robots more interesting to develop.

Thats interesting indeed, the 'Do the best you can with the least possible code' paradigm is challenging to a lot of people. My vote for an extra rumble would go to 'ExtendsRobot', although I know the winner will be kawigi.robot.Girl. I am not sure if such a rumble is possible, because I don't know if it can be (automatically) detected which base class is used.

It could use the honor system, like the twinduelrumble.

Yeah, that should be fine. And LiteRumble makes it super easy to start new rumbles. I'd also be a little interested in a perceptual rumble. I think RetroGirl would have a good chance at #1.

I second the motion of a perceptual rumble. I find perceptual bots interesting, and I would like to make a good one someday.

I'm pretty sure that of all the current perceptual bots, RetroGirl would be a definite king.

I noticed this a while ago.

I don't think that it's a very big deal. After all, the minirumble is for all robots that have a codesize of less than 1500 bytes, the microrumble is for all robots with a codesize less than 750 bytes, and the nanorumble is for all robots with a codesize less than 250 bytes. So, nanos and micros fit into the minirumble because, well, they are minis in the sense that they are all under 1500 bytes.

To say that minis and micros could could have their own exclusive rumbles would require different definitions of the weight classes. And, if you're going to all that trouble, you might consider more consistent brackets, like 250, 500, 1000, 2000.

While technically true they fit multiple ranges, I don't really consider nanobots to be micro or minibots, even thought they are. In my mind they are separate.

I only mention possible minibot and microbot only categories because setting them up would be relatively easy and painless. We already have all the battles for those robots done, they just need to be arranged differently. This would hopefully stimulate more interest in microbot and minibot development.

As for other rumbles. I think they would need enough interest to really justify a rumble for them. Though a Robot only one is probably a bit overdue.

It is indeed an interesting observation. Especially since I'm used to thinking of NanoBots as the fewest, since they're always calculated as a strict subset.

But I'm not sure I see the benefit of excluding smaller bots from the bigger rumbles? How would it stimulate interest? It kind of makes sense Nanos and Megas would be the most popular. If squeezing bots down to tiny sizes interests you, NanoBots are kind of the optimal version of that. If you're not, you might stick to MegaBots. I'm not sure why it's worth Wallaby losing his MiniMeleeRumble title, or LittleBlackBook not being allowed to take pride in crushing most MicroBots.

Precisely. I don't see how it would be a more interesting rumble if GlowBlowMelee wasn't beaten by a bot literally half its size.

I wasn't saying removing/replacing the current rumbles, that would be silly. I apologize if that is how it sounded.

Ah, gotcha. I'm still not sure it would change much... But I do think any kind of new competition can be a great/fun way to spur some interest. The Twin Duel was a ton of fun when a few people were actively contributing. But it's hard to gain traction, maybe since anyone who's actively Robocoding is usually already busy with a bot in one of the existing formats. And coding something for a new rule set is just harder.

Where can i find the rules for roborumble?

Or aren't there any limitation what my robot is allowed todo? (e.g. reflection, sockets, file-operations, etc.)

sorry if this is a repost. i'm new in this forum

Welcome! I don't think there are any rules like what you're looking for, except for what is allowed by Robocode itself. Reflection, network access, and general filesystem access are all disabled by Robocode's security manager, and your CPU time is limited to a few milliseconds per turn. You do have a small amount of controlled disk access - see AdvancedRobot.getDataFile. As for CPU time, if you use more than the amount Robocode calibrated for your system, your bot will skip some turns to make up for it.

Hope that helps and let us know if you still have questions.

But as for rules, anything in the spirit of the game is generally okay. That means anything that strictly uses the robocode API within the game. Anything that tries to attack the robot from outside the game is disabled, forbidden, or frowned upon. Examples of that are things like killing the enemy robot thread, or altering/reading internal robocode classes, etc.

Ah, yeah, I think the only "unwritten rule" is that people will get mad if you use multiple threads. This is an exploitable aspect of Robocode, since Robocode only tracks CPU time in the main thread, and you could theoretically steal CPU power from the opponent in your alternate threads.

In Twin Duel, disk access is disallowed despite the engine allowing it. It is written in the page there.

And the ban on multiple threads is written in a discussion page somewhere I can´t find anymore.

Those 2 are the only house rules not enforced by the engine that I can remember.

There is also a limit of 512MB heap space. You can see it in the client´s initialization scripts.

There was a great discussion on the old-wiki that started-off talking about multi-threading, but quickly digressed into deep philosophy.

Yeah, multiple threads are 'frowned upon' but not disallowed. Some robots use them (such as pear).

thanks for your replys! :)

what works in robocode will work in roborumble right?

Pretty much. If it works on stock Robocode, it should work in the rumble.

how many robots CAN i submit to roborumble?! i know it should be just 1

It depends how different they are. If it's just an improvement on an old one, then rather remove the old one, but if it's entirely new and different then it's fine keeping the old one in. It's usually better to give it a new name as well, if you're going to do that.

Yeah, submit as many as you want, but replace previous versions. If you add DrussGT 2.9.1, remove DrussGT 2.9.0 - you can revert if 2.9.1 is worse. And it's ok to have multiple bots that share some code, even though that's kind of like "different versions".

There's no guideline that it "should be just 1". I have 5, Kawigi has 15, and Stelokim has 20.

okay thanks guys :-) i hope i am able to upload one soon... i'm not very into robocode yet but i'm making progress

Just noticed Darkcanuck's RoboRumble server is down. Anyone know how long it's been down? Without any response from him in so long, I think it's probably the right time to transition to a new server, either a LiteRumble instance or setting up Darkcanuck's code on a new server.

Skilgannon, is it worth even trying to just transition our full load to your LiteRumble instance? Or would we need to upgrade to/setup a new one in a paid tier first? I don't think robowiki.net could handle a copy of Darkcanuck's server running but I could setup a new server somewhere if that's what we want. The query API that powers @roborumble is the thing I'd miss most. Though I could hack it to just parse LiteRumble pages (the first implementation did that on Darkcanuck's).

Country flags is what I'd miss most. Is the discussion page complete?

What do you mean by "complete"? If you mean all the requests have been filled on Darkcanuck's server, the answer is no. And also no if you mean any kind of automated flag system like the participants list.

By complete I mean if all flags used in Darkcanuck's server are registered as requests in the discussion page.

It would be "incomplete" if someone asked for a flag request without using the discussion page.

Ah, ok. I think he started off with all the same flags as the old server, so some of us never requested one, and I remember one unfulfilled request on his talk page. I think the list Chase posted + any outstanding requests on that page would be sufficient to get started though.

It will be really easy for me to set up another query API, I could even just make it an argument that gets added to the regular page request and it returns in JSON or something similar.

I think we see how it handles, and if it is constantly hitting the quota. If it is, upgrading should let it expand pretty much as far as we want, although the minimum for paid tier is $2.10/week.

A lot of times, when I stop my rumble client there will be several battles completed that just stay on my machine until the next time I start my rumble client. I've always thought this was fine in the past, but if one of those battles is for a robot who is retired before the next time I start my client, it seems like when it is uploaded the retired robot reappears in the rankings. Should I be trying to avoid this? And if so, how do I clean out the stored battles before starting the rumble client?

It wouldn't hurt. I personally try and shut down my client after it has finished uploading but before the first battle has finished. So there won't be a to upload log.

I always clear out roborumble/files/* and roborumble/temp/* before starting up my client, that clears out any cached results from last time. Would be nice (and not hard) to protect against that case somehow though.

I know I can't compete with giant clusters like bwbaugh, and it's not that scientific since it depends on what bots are submitted, but in case anyone's curious.. In September, I ran my i7 with 4 clients all month to see what I could max out at for battles contributed. Best I saw in "last 30 days" was 1,269,511.

I know my client spends more time on the upload than running battles, not sure if it's due to the extra latency from South Africa or just Darkcanuck's delays. That slow upload was one of my motivations for writing Literumble.

I built a custom results uploader which uploads battle results in parallel. Up to 15 simultaneous connections (configurable) are made to the server to work around latency issues. It makes a huge difference in melee, and also helps in 1v1.

As a side effect, priority battles are downloaded in parallel, and they are grouped together before writing them in the priority battles file.

If anyone is interested I can put it in the tools page.

It would be a lot more efficient to have batch uploads, but the work around above at least keeps backward compatibility.

Keep in mind that the delays in uploading to Darkcanuck's server were added intentionally because the server couldn't handle the load otherwise. So it might not be a great idea to circumvent them. But I do agree that they take a lot of time and it would be great to have a system with faster up loads.

On that note, maybe we should finally accept that Darkcanuck's server is "orphaned" and we need to setup a new one where we can update country flags / give people API access and so forth.

I think the biggest problem with Darkcanuck´s server right now is the admin, Darkcanuck, not being around. If the server suddenly goes offline for any reason, no one will be there to look after it.

That might be an idea, and while we are at it we can add support for bulk transfers at least to the server. Perhaps a modified url for bulk download of robot pairings as well. This should cut off considerable time required to run the rumble, as sometimes the uploading can take as long as just running the battles.

My feelings are split on if we should use the normal rumble or the lite rumble codebase. I like the idea behind the lite rumble, but python leaves much to be desired in the area of performance.

I would prefer Java EE, but there are a lot fewer clouds which support it.

I have never really used Java EE. But for web applications I still think that languages like PHP are best.

Java EE has features to ease web development while still allowing you to fallback to plain Java with all its features and libraries when needed.

But there are a lot more clouds supporting PHP than Java EE.

Google App Engine (where I've got LiteRumble) supports a subset of Java EE.

I'm not sure we really need any special casing of bulk uploads. The uploads already fly with LiteRumble with whatever he's doing now.

I'm also torn, as Darkcanuck's server has a pretty robust feature set and is time tested with the huge load of a real rumble server. But I don't think it would be hard for LiteRumble to gain the new stuff we want and I love how lean and flexible it is. It's also a code base someone active is familiar with. And I'm happy to pitch in for resources if we need anything to support "rumble scale".

Bulk uploads would be particularly nice for melee, because it would mean I wouldn't have to do as many database writes. But as far as upload speeds go, Literumble is way, way, way faster than Darkcanuck's server. Looking in his code, he has a 1 second wait hardcoded into each pairing upload, which is kind of ridiculous. That means that for each melee battle it takes a minute to upload once you count processing and connection overheads.

Finally a supporter!

I'll look into what would need to be done to do it later. I assume very little, since most of the system is already in place for it. But for reverse compatibility I will also see about adding an option to the roborumble configuration as well.

If you are going to change the protocol, a nice improvement would be to upload melee battle participants in a single group, so the server can keep track of full melee battles instead of pairings.

I am not sure. I would need a deeper look at the format of the results files, both for the normal rumble and for melee rumble.

The roborumble library is a bit of a mess. It also likes to use File IO. It writes and reads things a lot. I now want to fix that, but I know better then to fiddle with things beyond my (current) understanding.

It seems to upload each result individually. It then checks for an OK being returned and updates battlesnum. After it is done uploading all the results, it then sends this battlesnum to the server to update ratings. This seems like it would be better done all on the server when you upload the results.

So unless we want to get rid of that weird mechanic, I need to get the server to return a string of OK/NOT to the client so I can update this battlesnum.

Otherwise it is a simple matter of slightly restructuring the way it uploads battles.

Isn't the server which sends battlesnum back to the client? Which is deprecated with the improved priority battles list we have now.

How I think a good rumble protocol would work:

- Client requests and downloads the participants list from the wiki server.

- Client uploads participants list to rating server.

- Client uploads number of battles per iteration and downloads priority battles list from rating server. (can be done in the same request which uploads participants)

- Client downloads missing participants.

Run battles. If there is any error downloading priority battles list, fallback to random battle generation.

- Client uploads all battle results at once, keeping data structure as close as possible to how it is returned from the API. Server returns an OK or ERROR after the upload. If an ERROR occurs, keep the results for next iteration.

2 main differences are bulk uploads in the end and priority battles download in the beginning.

I am fully in favor of setting up a new rumble server, though I am fairly new to programming so I doubt I would be able to help much. Perhaps, if we are starting from scratch, we could go ahead with the Roborumble.org project that has been talked about for many years.

Would the entire ~1000 bot participants list move over to the new server, or would we start over fresh with active participants and a stable of "classic" bots that have historical/otherwise significance?

The answer to that question may decide who ends up with the #1 spot on the new rumble server. ;)

If it's just a matter of copying, I see no reason not to move the entire list. But, if we change it so that every bot has to be added individually, I doubt many people would be volunteering to move 1000+ bots. :)

I think it´s better to keep them all. For me, as long as the server can handle, the more participants the better.

If you want a smaller rumble, we can create another division.

About who ends up #1 being affected by others below it, we will end up ressurrecting the king maker discussion started a long time ago.

The "should we make another rumble" or "should we restart the rumble" was something that has been tossed around for years. Generally the answers have been no. Mostly since there was no very good reason to do so.

Perhaps when we get obstacles into the game, we can get a new rumble going with a special arena, or urban combat robots.

About obstacles in the game. There is a mod called Virtual Combat which is exactly that.

Also BerryBots has obstacles in a very robust / configurable fashion, as opposed to tacked onto a game not designed for it. =)

(I think you're both on Windows, though, and it's not on Windows yet. Very soon though. I bought Windows 8 and got BerryBots running on it, but there's some more stuff to be done before releasing.)

Just make sure it is usable on Windows 7. That is, don't use anything that is Windows 8 only.

Pretty confident that won't be a problem. I'm using MinGW, and the graphics libraries are wxWidgets and SFML, both of which are cross-platform and I'm compiling them from source too. But I'm not going out and buying any more friggin' copies of Windows =), so hopefully I can get someone to test it out.

I have Windows 7 and I am very excited about trying BerryBots.

Just out of curiosity, is 8 really as bad as they say?

I haven't really used Windows since XP, and I haven't played with 8 much yet. So far my impression is mainly that the UI has some nice little things, isn't much better or worse than XP, but definitely a lot weirder. I like that they're at least trying something different but I expected it to like it a little more than I do.

I'm turned off by Windows 8, myself. I like Windows 7, but I don't use it. I'm still using XP, primarily because copies of Windows are always about twice as expensive as I am willing to pay. I'm kind of hoping once Windows 8 is going full steam, that copies of Windows 7 might get discounted to a price I am actually willing to play.

You know what -- I make decent pay at my job, but I'm still not willing to pay what Microsoft wants for copies of Windows. I have to think that very very few people actually buy copies of Windows, if I'm not willing to. I would guess most people just use whatever comes on whatever machine they buy. I build my own computers, so that is not really an option for me. If I could get games to run under Linux, I would probably switch. Games are the only thing really holding me to Windows at this point.

Back a little closer to on topic, if there were to be a new Rumble, I would want the full list of robots in it. I probably would not participate in a combat with obstacles, just due to lack of spare time for play. If I had more time, I would get into the existing melee first.

Prompted by some interest from Chase, I posted the current in-development version of BerryBots, compiled for Windows (on Windows 8/MinGW): berrybots_wintest1.zip (~20 MB). You should be able to just unzip and run berrybots.bat. If anyone wants to test it out, I'd love to hear if/how well it works on other Windows's - I haven't tested anywhere beyond my own Windows 8 install.

One thing I'd be curious to hear is if tab navigation in the dialogs works - it's not working for me on Win8, but does on other platforms. Trying to figure out if I need to hand-code that for Windows.

I'm getting an error when I try to run on Win7: "The program can't start because libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem".

Ok, much thanks for testing it out. Chase got something similar, so I guess I have some research to do. Maybe it is depending on having MinGW installed or something.

I'm able to duplicate this by removing MinGW stuff from my path. I just need to straighten out static linking and/or including the .dll's for a couple things. Hope to have another test version posted soon for anyone still willing to help.

Well, the simplest solution is apparently to just include the MinGW DLL's I depend on. I've put them here (just drop them in berrybots/), and the updated zip with them is here.

I'd rather not be distributing all these DLLs so I'm going to look into statically linking against them. But since I'm also dynamically linking to wxWidgets, which links to these, I have to switch to statically linking against that first. I guess there's also debate about how dynamic vs static vs any linking at all relates to the GPL terms, but I'm already using a more permissive license than that, anyway.

If nothing else, this whole "build a cross-platform / native desktop GUI app" has been a pretty educational experience. :-)

That is understandable. In that case it should be fine. As long as you are not using the Windows 8 only apis (which do exist!). But from the soudns of it, you're not. Since I don't think MinGW supports any of that yet.

In december I ran my i7 with one client continuously, it delivered 280k battles in 31 days. It also depends a bit on the priority battles to do, a new micro usually is faster and delivers more battles than f.e. a new XanderCat. I was proud on my 9000 battles a day, I remember the time when only David Alves could deliver more battles per month.

I can't reach it, and my GTStats just failed so the wiki can't reach it either...

Yep, down for me. I definitely saw some RoboRumble uploads time out in the last day or so, too. Hopefully it comes back, but we can always make an emergency migration to LiteRumble... =)

Down for me too. Just wanted to know against which bots GeomancyBS is better than DrussGT ;-) (and also against who GresSuffurd is better than DrussGT. Out of 970 opponents there should be at least one)

It's back up.

Anyone object to having Robocode 1.7.3.6 as a rumble-approved version? There have been a number of bug fixes over time, no changes I'd expect to introduce issues, and additionally 1.7.3.2 and 1.7.3.0 can't actually be downloaded from sourceforge anymore apparently.

I actually emailed Darkcanuck about this... he said he's been busy but he'll get on to this when he has time. Until 1.7.3.6 I can't really contribute to rumble as my client keeps hanging during upload - especially once all 4 clients try to upload at once.

Any update on this? I was looking to start setting up Robocode again, preferably a version that can be used for the rumble. I'm going to hold off until I know what version to use and where I can get it.

We haven't heard from Darkcanuck in quite a while, so as far as I know we're still at a max of 1.7.3.2 on his server. Skilgannon has been playing with his LiteRumble at literumble.appspot.com, and he's using 1.7.4.x, but I don't think it can handle the load we put on Darkcanuck's. Not sure how long we should wait before considering moving to a new server. We could setup a new instance of Darkcanuck's code elsewhere. (I hope everything's ok with Darkcanuck, just speaking personally.)

If someone builds a new server, I would ask to not restrict it to only a few versions (i.e. 1.7.3.0, 1.7.3.2). Doing the opposite, banning only specific versions, with the latest versions being allowed by default, would work a lot better.

If we set up a new server I have some changes which will need to be made to the melee priorities battles. The current system sends back a priority battle for each pairing, and the client just runs the first N.

Very well. I'm going to check my backups and see if I have a copy 1.7.3.2 to use. I'm pretty sure I have a copy of 1.7.3.0, but I would rather not use that version due to the bullet bug in that version (http://sourceforge.net/p/robocode/bugs/303/). But if it's all I got, I'll go ahead and use it.

Hi mates. I recently spotted some robots that might only work well under 1.7.3.2 (Wolverine, Tachikoma) and i'm not sure how to deal with it. By now the score of these bots are dependent of the contribution version and this inflicts the overall score i guess. I'm running on 1.7.3.2 and mainly contributed to MeleeRumble so i guess all my results vs those bots are ok. On the other hand KID_RINZLER (the new main contributor, great job btw.) is running 1.7.3.0 and now these bots get worse. So the overall ranking now depends a little on how many games vs those bots my client (MN as well) picks and i'm quite unhappy with it. What do you think is the best way to handle this. I guess the best solution would be to change the RumbleServer to 1.7.3.6 but until Darkcanuck find the time to do this could we maybe think of a quick fix somehow.

Take Care

The quick fix would be making bots compatible with Robocode 1.7.3.0 and Java 1.5.

Usually, bots which are incompatible with the official versions in the rumble are removed from the participants list.

I dont think the rules are 1.7.3.0 only. Or did i miss something? Otherwise this would be a big surprise to me because i build my bots on 1.7.3.6 and have no idea what methods 1.7.3.0 supports and what not.

It seems very strange, especially considering Wolverine is an ancient bot. There should be no rule or API changes between those versions. If those bots are unstable, I guess I'd vote to remove them, at least temporarily until we can figure out what's up.

For some open source bots like SilverSurfer, people have fixed issues introduced by new versions of Robocode and posted the fix to the rumble, which is a cool solution when possible.

Wolverine is open source and he uses get...Events() to utilize his bot instead of overloaded eventMethods. My guess is, this is the issue somewhere between the versions. I only can say that every result uploaded by an 1.7.3.2 client leads to good behavior and 1.7.3.0 leads to "sitting duck" the bot.

Its up to you Voidious to remove the bots, i think it concerns you the most. Because Diamond would jump up and down his rankings. I personally don't care that much for now - they are not my weight class.

Hi darkcanuck Can you add 1.7.3.6 to the list of allowable upload clients? It's fixed a bug with upload timeouts so that they don't hang the rumble client, which has been holding me back from uploading at home.

Thank you!

Hi Skilgannon. You can take the 1.7.3.6 copy of "../libs/roborumble.jar" and copy it to your 1.7.3.[0|2] version. There you have the new rumble client with the fixed timeout.

Edit: Ahh i think i missread the question. You probably know that already.

I would also like to see 1.7.3.6 as new upload client.

Some slight modification will need to be made to both the server and the client. But the only excuse I can really think against it is that 'it works as is'. But post is faster, and not really hard to do on either side.

How to use post on the serverside.

<?php

$postTotal = $_POST['total'];
for($i=0;$i<$postTotal;$i++) {
	handleUpload($_POST['r'.$i]);
}

?>

Wooo done, barring some parsing that should be already written.

How to use post in Java

public static final String sendPostAndGetReply(final URL url, final String post) throws IOException {
	URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
	conn.setDoInput(true);
	conn.setDoOutput(true);
	conn.setUseCaches(false);
	conn.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
	
	DataOutputStream out = new DataOutputStream(conn.getOutputStream());
	out.writeBytes(post);
	out.flush();
	out.close();
	
	//IOToolkit.getAndClose just gets all the bytes from a stream then closes it
	return new String(IOToolkit.getAndClose(conn.getInputStream()),"UTF-8");
}

Barring some encoding which is also already done.

I know the encoded string looks something like this, except URL encoded.

roborumble,1,800x800,Chase,1326909734701,SERVER;cs.pm.Pytko 1.1,119,49,1;cs.ExclusionNano 1.1,19,19,0

Practically, is this going to make any difference? I think the slowest part of processing a result is by far the database activity. "It works as is" is a pretty good reason up against virtually no impact. :-)

Also, I did some quick Googling to see how much faster it is, and it seems like everyone says they're the same or GET is faster.

(If we are going to change the protocol, maybe we should go with SPDY. ;) jk)

I remember POST already being used for uploads the last time I checked the client code. And the main difference between GET and POST is not raw performance, but how proxy servers deal with them. GET is usually cached while POST isn´t.

To increase upload speed, batch uploads (everything in a single request) and batch inserts in the database (everything in a single commit) would do a better job.

Ah, are they, that is sorta what I ment, meaning you can just bundle all of them in a POST and upload them all at once. I figured it was still using GET, which makes batching more difficult.

My RR-client cannot download some robots:

Iteration number 0
Downloading rating files ...
Downloading participants list ...
Downloading missing bots ...
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:com.cohesiva.robocode.ManOwaR_1.0.jar
Could not download com.cohesiva.robocode.ManOwaR_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:FatalFlaw.FatalFlaw_1.0.5.jar
Could not download FatalFlaw.FatalFlaw_1.0.5.jar
Downloaded lxx.Tomcat 3.57 into ./robots/lxx.Tomcat_3.57.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:SFS.SamsSecondRobot_1.0.jar
Could not download SFS.SamsSecondRobot_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Megas.AGravitatorExcel_1.0.jar
Could not download sp.Megas.AGravitatorExcel_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Megas.AGravitatorExcel_1.4.jar
Could not download sp.Megas.AGravitatorExcel_1.4.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Megas.Trident_1.0.jar
Could not download sp.Megas.Trident_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Micros.LCreeper_1.0.jar
Could not download sp.Micros.LCreeper_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Micros.LExtermination_1.0.jar
Could not download sp.Micros.LExtermination_1.0.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Minis.LNightHawk_1.2.jar
Could not download sp.Minis.LNightHawk_1.2.jar
java.util.zip.ZipException: error in opening zip file
Downloaded file is wrong or corrupted:sp.Nanos.CopyMachine_1.0.jar
Could not download sp.Nanos.CopyMachine_1.0.jar
Removing old participants from server ...
Removing entry ... lxx.Tomcat_3.56 from roborumble
OK.  Removed bot lxx.Tomcat 3.56
Preparing battles list using smart battles...Prioritary battles file not found .
..
Executing battles ...

Can anyone share this robots? Or, maybe, we should remove them?

I understood scale of tragedy... We're really needing in new robocoderepository server

I updated the robots database pack in the Starting With RoboRumble page. It was after robocoderepository went down, and was complete at the time.

Do we have access to the last sources and data somehow? If so, i could try to set up a temporary repository on my server.

I think the repository need a major rewrite anyway. (Even the redirect has serious bug that prevent it from working in some browser. It returns non-standard HTTP header [302 Temporarily Redirect]). The data could be re-uploaded from RoboRubmble Starter kit.

As for the source code, it seems that neither of us has hold of it.

Well, rewrite would be a little to much for me by now. I wrote an email to the repository maker once but didn't get an response (probably to dated) but i'm sure one of the veterans have a current email address of him.

What do you mean with the data could be re-uploaded from Roborumble starter kit? Do ypu mean the current robots who are registered at the competitions? Not every robot package includes the sources, most of the old robots had his sources published over the repository. And it would be a great pitty to loose the comments of the authors as well.

Has someone an idear how to handle this issue?

The RoboRumble starter kit is enough to keep RoboRumble alive for now.

But contacting the Robocode Repository admin somehow would be best. So we could recover all that robot archive and mirror it somewhere else.

Hi mates... (sorry for my bad english) Can i suggest a discussion about the melee ranking in mini, micro, nano weight? Maybe i don't fully understand how the ranking is working, please correct me if i'm wrong.

To me it looks like, that the lower weight classes are influenced by the battles against the higher weights. Lets say we have a nano bot who is specialized on close combat. Against the own class bots it could survive very well because the other bots are also limited and you can put more code in the gun than the movement. If it now comes to pairings against the, lets say mega bots, it has to die very quickly because it goes still close to the enemy (not the best idear against a heavy gun). This is just an example. What it shows, is that you have to deal with the mega bots and there is only one option - improve the avoid movement. If you improve the movement you have no codesize left for a competitive gun against your own class and so on. I think the current ranking system fafors the movement more than it should. One more point is that the current ranking favors mega weight (more bots) and so you get way more battles where you are paired against bots of other classes (it looks like 3:1 battles against higher classes). My suggest is to make the weight classes indepentend. I think you can still be paired against the higher classes but it shoul'nd count for your current class if there is another bot of your class within this pairing.

I hope it is clear what i meant and you should see what i want to say. My english writing isn't that good and i wished i could explain it a little more ... but well you know:)

Wompi

You want nanobot rankings to use battles with nanobots only.

I think it is not being done mostly because of historical reasons. 10 years ago there was barely enough CPU to process a single melee league, much less 4 independent melee leagues.

Today it might be viable. But the client needs to be modified and the melee rankings in the server needs a reset.

Yes this is what i want. Aswell mini and micro. Hmm are you sure about the historical reasons? Because the single bot weight classes are independent as far as i can see this. My thought was that the battle pairing script isn't capable of matching the bots on weight classes for melee.

I'm not sure if the client has to be changed, would'nt it be the same logic just with other battle pairings? I mean if the client is ready to run shuffled melee it should be ready to run weight class battles just as good. I think there might be some work on server side to bring the right battlepairings up, but i could be wrong. About the reset of the current ranking results, well i have'nt thougt about this. I'm not sure how big the influence would be on the current results. On the other hand, maybe a reset brings back some vets to work on there bots again - who knows.

All in all i really would like to see a ranking by classes. I find it very educational to start with the lower classes, because there is plenty to learn from.

Sidenote: MN can you do something with your mn.SuperSittingDuck 1.0 it says on both (1.7.3.0 and 1.7.3.2) clients that i cannot handle this bot. It is something around version minor/major. (not quit sure i can recheck this if you want) ... no offense. It would just be nice.

Did someone find a bug in my single-line-of-code bot?

That bot was generated with the internal Robocode IDE. The only causes I can think of are Java 1.5 incompatibility, or corrupted downloads.

Todays download (1.7.3.4 client) .. rebuild database Got an error with mn.SuperSittingDuck: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: mn/SuperSittingDuck : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0

Java 1.5 incompatibility then. I´ll update the bot later.

I think there are quite a few bots compiled with Java 6. Any chance you can upgrade? Java 5's pretty old. Even us Mac users have Java 6 now. =)

Hmmm .... i got:

Terminal: java -version java version "1.6.0_29" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_29-b11-402-10M3527) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.4-b02-402, mixed mode)

Robocode About: Running on Java 1.6.0_29 (64-bit) by Apple Inc. 

So i'm almost half sure :) that i'm runing on 1.6 ... i will recheck this. And SuperSittingDuck is the only bot who gives me this exception.

Edit: looks like you used 1.7 ... according to wiki - class version 51 is 1.7.

One thing to be clear about: while a battle containing MegaBots is not ignored in the NanoBot rankings, only the relative score of two NanoBots in that battle is contributed to NanoMeleeRumble. If NanoBot A gets 9th with 500 points and NanoBot B gets 10th with 300 points, what's logged to the NanoMeleeRumble is A winning over B with 62.5%. NanoBots that do particularly well or poorly against MegaBots will still have their rumble score impacted by how many NanoBot-only battles they get, though.

Since most bots in a weight class have similar weaknesses against bigger bots, I don't think it's having a huge effect, but it isn't zero either. I've seen MicroBots have their MicroMeleeRumble score change by maybe 0.5 APS from the time they have 2000 Mega-battles to the time they have 2000 Micro-battles.

I agree counting only all-NanoBot battles for NanoMeleeRumble would be better, and that the CPU load is probably not a huge issue. (Non-MegaBots tend to be so much faster, Melee rumbles have less activity than 1v1, and our CPUs have gotten much faster, too.) I think the biggest hurdle is how much work it would take to implement vs how much it would really change scores. I think it would require client changes, too, because the client is what decides which pairing data gets uploaded to which rumble.

Those 2000 Micro-battles all have megabots in them.

In a nanobot only league, nanobots will be killed by other nanobots. Simple targeting against simple movement. It might completely change survival scores and rankings. If you watch a samplebot only melee battle, Walls usually survives last. Add a single megabot and Crazy tends to survive longer. (flatter movement profiles tends to be ignored by top bots in melee)

I could volunteer to update the client, although there are other things in the rumble bothering me more, like slow client uploads. I would prefer to fix those first.

What do you mean? As far as I know, it works like this:

• MegaBot battles until 2000 battles in MeleeRumble.
• Battles against lowest weight class bots only until 2000 battles in lowest weight class.

It used to go MiniBots until 2k in MiniMeleeRumble, then Micros, then Nanos, but it was changed to result in less overall battles for Nanos/Micros, since they're already getting so many extra before they've stabilized in every weight class.

Currently, all melee battles mix all weight classes.

All bots battles until there are 2000 battles in megabot ranking. 2000 is the sum of all pairings against nanobots to megabots.

But in nanobot rankings the sum of all nanobot pairings is still lower than 2000. Then all bots battles until there are 2000 battles in nanobot rankings. Which means the sum of all nanobot pairings is 2000, but all those battles in nanorumble still include megabots.

Almost no battles have 10 nanobots. A battle with 2 nanobots and 8 megabots also counts for nanorumble. And those 8 megabots affect the APS between the 2 nanos. Those 2 will be crushed before having the chance to interact with each other, the nano with worse movement profile being crushed first.

I was very strongly under the impression "but all those battles in nanorumble still include megabots" is not the way it is. Yes, the battles from when megabots are getting to 2000 score *are* still counted, but new battles made specially for the smaller league only include smaller league bots. At very least, that's how it used to be I believe.

Really? Definitely not how it used to work, and sounds like it could even be a bug in the client. Maybe Darkcanuck can comment.

I had a look at the client source and to me it looks that the battle generator works a little bit different. As allways i might be wrong with that but to me it looks that the client pairs allways first the bots out of the "prioritymelee.txt" (send by the server) against the whole competition. If the server sends no priority file (does that ever happen?) the client checks the bots current battles against the BATTLESPERBOT property. The client checks this property from top down GENERAL,MINI,MICRO,NANO. If you have the standard property of 2000 battles this means by the way you come to the nano class you have 2000 general (all bots) 2000 mini (mini,micro,nano) and so on battles until you reach your own class weight. Til then it it is very possible that you have the 2000 battles reached in your own class and you never come against your own class only. You can recheck this by having a look at the "PrepareBattles.java" class.

Beside the battlegeneration i still find there is another reason while we should think about weight class only competitions. Voidious stated above with his example of bot A and bot B only the relation between this two bots. But if you take all bots of your weight class into account you see that bot a might be better in this particular battle and might be the best bot in his class. But if bot B has an overall better movement he will sum up scorepoints against all weaker bots of his class and so in the end he will be better than A. Maybe the example is'nt so good but i would just show that you have to look on the influence on the whole weight class. If a bot has a stronger movement it is most likely that he will gain an overall more score than one bot with a weaker movement but a strong class releated gun. Moreover, how the client picks the opponents is very random and it can be that bot B allways (or at least more) become weaker mega bots then bot A and this can generate another influence on the overall scoring.

Please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong. I'm still very new to robocode/roborumble and it might be this lack of experience that took me the wrong way.

Slow upload isn't client problem; it's the server. I believe darkcanuck is throttling the upload on the server because the server can't handle the load,

Although if we do this we should clear all the battle data from nano/micro/minimeleerumble, too.

Its how the protocol works which slows down uploads. According to Bwbaugh, the server can handle about 30 clients. Or can handle 30 times what a single client uploads.

The ideal would be to adapt the protocol for batch uploads, but it is also possible to achieve a similar speed up changing the client alone.

Faster uploads would benefit all leagues, melee leagues even more, since a single melee battle generates about 45 to 180 pairings.

Hi mates.. I had today another closer look at the meleeranking and it turned out there is a kind of a bug in the prepare battle behaivior. The client, as i somewhat above stated, takes allways the "prioritymelee.txt" entrys first and then pairs it against the whole competition field. The prioritymelee file contains single competition bots as well what is not much of a problem because these bots will be filtered and the pairing will be rejected. On the other hand, there are alot of bots who take place in both competitions. This has an influence on the meleebattle generation.

Example: Bot A registers for melee and single competition. The server sends from now all priority pairings for this bot. Now, everytime the server sends a priority pairing for A and B (aswell registered for both - melee/single ) it comes to a meleebattle generation against the whole meleefield. Despite the fact that there are alot of bots registered for both competitions it is almost impossible for bot A to get ever a battle against his own class only, atleast until the single competition pairings are finished.

With this in mind you can see the melee compatition as one big competition only. Bots who are registered for melee only have a slight advantage over her classmates :) because they get more class specific battles if they reach the BATTLESPERBOT property.

Maybe someone can recheck this and if it works like this, maybe we can discuss how we could give the melee rumble a makeover.

Take care

Getting this error when I try to access any of the rankings: ERROR: connection failed to server localhost user rumbleuser-darkcanuck (mysql error: Access denied for user 'rumbleuser-darkcanuck'@'localhost' (using password: YES)).

Sorry about that -- there was an unplanned outage earlier today. Service was back to normal around 10:30 EST.

It seems a recent backup restore may have selectively reverted my robocode roborumble config file, dramatically decreasing the cpu constant I use in my rumble configuration. Since I run many concurrently this `could have had` considerable negative rating for some robots.

So I ask you remove my contribs from the 15th onward. I apologize for not noticing this sooner.

No worries, I have a mostly-automated method for cleanup. Will do this in the next few days as soon as I get some free time. Everything from the 15th to the 20th (inclusive)?

That should do it. I cannot be sure it actually corrupted any rankings, but better safe then sorry right?

Have the server run the main rumble against robots like it does now, with the following addition.

First give option of running a random battles a lower chance (say 20% to 40% area).

After it has gotten the most critical robots stabilized (current behavior).

Find the pairing that has the lowest number of battles run, and run that. If there is a tie, run the robot that has the lowest number of battles. If there is a tie of that, just use the first one that comes up in the query (less server work then random).

That way even old robots with tons of battles are still considered for more battles and it helps overall stabilization.

The optimal criteria for prioritizing battles depends on the ranking system, although aiming for equal number of battles per pairing works well for most systems. Old robots with tons of battles are still considered whenever a new competitor enters the rumble.

Old robots don´t really need more battles on old pairings except with incremental Elo rating system. Incremental Elo works better with random pairings (equal frequency instead of equal quantity).

Not old battles on old pairings. But rather battles on low number of battles for a pairing. Even if a robot has hundreds of thousands of battles. Those battles were selected randomly before, meaning there may be pairings that only have 2 or 3 battles (possibly, I cannot name any, but it is within the realm of possibility). Which is why I stated select those pairings that have low number of battles, regardless of number of battles the given robot has.

That's how the current system already works: it seeks out pairings with low battle counts, regardless of either bot's total battle count. The tie-breaking you've proposed is unecessary, although perhaps the random % could be reduced. Try finding a pairing with less than 7 battles now; before the change it was common for ancient bots to have some 2- or 3-battle pairings, now they're extinct.

I think the more stable we can make the rumble by running a great deal of battles, the better. Since my clients are almost pulling around the clock battles (and will be for awhile yet).