RoboRunner

Sub-pages:

Version History - Help

---

A batch battle runner in the vein of RoboLeague and RoboResearch. Designed to be easy to setup and to run fast with multi-threading and persistent Robocode engines, using the Robocode control API.

Download and install

• Download it here: roborunner-1.1.1.zip (1.6 MB)
• Unzip the contents into a new directory, e.g. ~/roborunner.
• Run setup.sh to make n clones of an existing Robocode directory, where n is the number of concurrent threads you plan to run with. E.g., ./setup.sh 3 ~/robocode_1.7.4.1

Sorry, the setup is Unix only right now. If anyone wants to contribute analogous .bat files, please feel free. Or maybe you can run the shell scripts with Cygwin. RoboRunner itself should work fine if you install some copies of Robocode and point to them in roborunner.properties.

Running battles

• Copy some bots into roborunner/bots. JARs will be copied, if necessary, into the robots directory of each Robocode install on launch.
• Create a .rrc file to configure a challenge, or use one from RoboResearch.
• Run some battles with rr.sh. E.g., ./rr.sh -bot voidious.Diamond 1.8.2 -c dibed35.rrc -seasons 5

Advantages over RoboResearch

• Easy to setup and get started.
• Keeps Robocode engine processes running instead of spinning up a new JVM for every battle, for much improved performance.
• Support for Melee and custom battlefield sizes.
• Scores for each challenger are kept in a separate file. No slow-downs because of all the previous battles you've run, and no fussing with databases.
• Cleaner, more human readable output.

Source code

I've published the code in the public domain at GitHub: RoboRunner repo

RoboRunner depends on Guava, which is included in the download above. Read about it or grab the latest JAR here: http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

What's missing?

There are still some important things missing. Here's my current to do list, in rough priority order.

• override for number of threads, <= number of installs specified
• JVM arguments in roborunner.properties, right now just passing -Xmx512M
• specify dirs for sources of robots in roborunner.properties
• option for complete, per bot output after every battle or season
• option to force wiki output (eg for MC2K7)
• support for Windows (.bat files and/or setup instructions)
• print % of bots faced until it is 100%
• print avg elapsed time per battle at end
• handle errors in battles, maybe dying processes or timed out battles too
• arg to clear .data dirs before starting
• store individual battle scores instead of running totals, if there’s demand / use for it
• recover from corrupted data files
• unit tests!

Feature ideas

• Custom battle listeners for more sophisticated scoring or other analysis.
• Optional "ghost bot": print score comparisons to a different bot/version that you've already run.
• Track and print standard deviation and/or confidence interval for scores.
• Instead of running fixed # of battles per bot, dynamically decide what battles to run based on what would increase overall score accuracy the most (ie, whichever bots have highest variance).