Twin Duel
- Sub-pages:
- Participants - Results - Strategy Guide - Tourney Runner - Origin Discussion - Archived Talk 20090807
A 2v2 teams / survivalist competition that began in mid-2006 as a weekly tournament. The format has an interesting mix of 1v1 and melee strategy, and even ramming can be used effectively.
Rules
- Competitors will be 2-bot teams on an 800x800 field.
- Code Size of teams must be under 2,000 code bytes. This is measured by running the code size utility on the team's .jar file. This can mean two instances of one bot that is under 2,000, or two bots that total under 2,000, including shared code.
- No writing to or reading from files is allowed.
- Battles will be 75 rounds, with the winner being the team with the most survival firsts.
Tournament
This has always been run in a weekly tournament format, but a RoboRumble division using these rules is now being discussed, as well.
Tournament procedure
- The first portion of the tournament is round robin, where every team fights every other team. Based on win / loss records, teams will be seeded for a bracket style tourney. Ties will be discarded and the match run again. The tie breaker for seeding will be percentage of survival firsts throughout all round robin battles. Byes will be given to top seeds in the bracket tourney, as needed.
- The bracket tourney is single-elimination.
- The finals of the bracket tourney will be a best of 3 series; the rest of the bracket matches will be single battles.
- Battles have always been run by Voidious, though this is not written stone. =)
Tournament schedule
As of August, 2009, the Twin Duel is running again on Thursdays. Please post your entrants by midnight EST (UTC-5) on Wednesday, either by notifying Voidious directly or updating Twin Duel/Participants.
A brief history
- For a more complete history, view the Origin Discussion, the Archived Talk 20090807, or the discussions attached to past results.
The idea for a new weekly competition began with a discussion among active Robocoders in 2006, inspired by the long-defunct MiniBot Challenge. One of the goals was to create a format that would demand new strategies that hadn't been explored before; another goal was to force participants to create new bots instead of simply adapting existing ones. After some discussion, the current rule set was agreed upon.
The styles of the first teams varied greatly, including adaptations of 1v1 bots, adaptations of melee bots, and original teams. There were 6 teams the first week (/Results/20060803); GruwelTwins by GrubbmGait, a modified version of the melee bot Gruwel, completely dominated, going undefeated and winning over 90% of its rounds. The second week (/Results/20060810) had 5 new teams (11 total); Kev's new GeminiTeam, with an aggressive 1v1 style movement, proved very strong and took the crown. The title changed hands many times through the end of 2006, including a 3-week streak for the Wave Surfing, wiki packaged KomariousTeam, and a 6-week streak for the melee/hybrid style LuminariousDuo by Voidious.
Kawigi returned to Robocode to introduce MarioBros in January 2007, which proceeded to dominate the Twin Duel for many months. Similar to LuminariousDuo, MarioBros used a hybrid movement, combining a "Raiko-style" 1v1 Random Movement and a Minimum Risk Movement. While MarioBros did not win 100% of its matches against every team, it came very close to it. By summer of 2007, activity had slowed down, and the tourney was not run for several months.
The Twin Duel resumed in the fall. After several more MarioBros wins, its dominance finally ended with an update to LuminariousDuo. LuminariousDuo won the majority of weeks through January 2008 (the rest going to MarioBros), when Kev returned to action with an update to GeminiTeam, which once again dominated the entire field. GeminiTeam won until Skilgannon's NightAndDay squeaked out an improbable victory in late February.
In March, Rednaxela's LunarTwins showed up, utilizing an all-new strategy that nobody else had tried and that few teams were prepared for. With an ultra-aggressive ramming / gang-up style of movement and a well-utilized Droid, LunarTwins made quick work of every team in the competition. An update to GeminiTeam the following week allowed it to resume its throne, but only by a very small margin. Only one more Twin Duel was run before a very long hiatus, and an updated LunarTwins took home the crown. But the matchup between GeminiTeam and LunarTwins was left very close to even.
See also
