RabidWombat

RabidWombat
Author(s)	RobertWalker
Extends	PluggableRobot
Targeting	Virtual gun array: head-on linear circular guess factor
Movement	antigravity
Code License	no license selected yet

News

After not having Robocoded in quite some time, and at the prompting of a co-worker, I bit the bullet and entered RabidWombat into RoboRumble. Hopefully this will motivate me to improve it some more.

Background Info

What's special about it?

Nothing, particularly. Just another bot.

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?

RabidWombat 0.7

How competitive is it?

It's not done yet, so it's not that competitive. It beats the SampleBots, of course. I've also been pitting it against SpareParts with good success.

Strategy

How does it move?

It uses a variation of antigravity movement. The enemy robot exerts an attractive or repulsive force on RabidWombat, depending on how far away it is, in order to maintain a particular distance from the enemy. (It's pretty much working on Hooke's law.) That distance grows if RabidWombat is losing and shrinks if it's winning, so that it'll run away or close in for the kill as appropriate. Walls exert a repulsive force when RabidWombat gets close enough to them, which gets stronger the closer it is. Bullet dodging is also done with force vectors (see below).

How does it fire?

It has a virtual gun array containing (currently) a head-on targeting gun, a linear targeting gun, a circular targeting gun and a guess factor gun. (I suppose the linear targeting gun is probably redundant.) It fires waves (for guess factor targeting) and virtual bullets (for tracking the success of the various guns) every turn and fires the real bullets with the best gun. Stats decay over time so that it will adapt more readily to changes in enemy behavior. I might add a pattern matching gun to the array.

How does it dodge bullets?

For the moment, it assumes that the opponent is using head-on targeting, then creates a force vector which is perpendicular to the presumed bullet's flight path so that it will run away from the bullet. I'm still somewhat undecided on the final bullet dodging strategy.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Currently, it saves gun accuracy, guess factor and energy stats between rounds and nothing between matches.

Additional Info

Where did you get the name?

It sounded cool. Its initials happening to be RW didn't hurt, either.

Can I use your code?

Yes, although I haven't applied a license yet, it really doesn't bother me if someone wants to adapt the code for their own purposes, as long as you credit me.

What's next for your robot?

Here's the to-do list:

• RabidWombat is currently not shooting where it thinks it is all the time, so I need to fix that.
• Update for Java 6.
• Improve bullet dodging
• Add a pattern matching gun
• Take wall bumping into account for virtual gun calculations
• Weight virtual gun stats based on hit probability
• Segment statistics
• Tweak, tweak, tweak...

Does it have any white whales?

For now, I've been pitting RabidWombat against SpareParts, with good results.

Credits

PluggableRobot was developed in parallel to support RabidWombat, so look there for some credits. Other than that, it wasn't directly based on any other robot, although I've culled many ideas from the wiki. I'm trying to be good about giving attribution in the source, and when I get some time I'll transfer them to the wiki.