Portia

Portia
Author(s)	Positive
Extends	AdvancedRobot
Targeting	Semi-linear targeting
Movement	Minimum Risk Movement
Released	July 2009
Current Version	1.00
Code License	closed
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Background Information

What's special about it?

Portia is my first robot, and I'm very proud of it. :)

How competitive is it?

We'll see. :)

Melee strategy

How does it move?

It simulates enemy bullet fire and danger zones, and tries to avoid them by selecting from different exact movement plots.

How does it fire?

It uses semi-linear and semi-headon firing. The results vary, and currently it preforms very poor against some bots using Oscillator Movement.

How does it select a target to attack/avoid in melee?

It mainly selects the closest opponent, but it tries not to switch targets too much. If it's near a corner it highly prefers opponents near the same corner.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Between rounds, it saves general linear-targeting info. If an opponent only seems to be shooting with Head-On Targeting like HawkOnFire, it remembers that between matches.

One-on-one strategy

How does it move in One-on-one?

Until the end game, it first tries to use Stop And Go-like movement, and if the opponent seems to catch on it switches to Random Movement. At the end game, it will try to get very close to the opponent to give the final blow. :)

How does it fire?

It uses an ultra-fast decaying GF gun. If the current GF-bin doesn't have a lot of data, or has high entropy (not many recorded firing angles in the same range), it uses the most recent GF angles instead.

Additional Information

Where did you get the name?

"Portia" is the name of a spider I'm somewhat fascinated with. The spider is extremely intelligent (considering its size & that it's a spider): it can hunt using a plethora of methods, and attacks and defends itself strategically. I thought that name was a great fit. :) You can read more about the spider here.

Can I use your code?

At the moment I'm keeping it closed source. Turn on paint to get an idea what it's thinking though. :)

What's next for your robot?

• Fast trigonometry (it's somewhat slow now and then, and I think the many calls to sin & cos have something to do with it).
• Better melee targeting
  • Beat simple pattern bots
  • Beat oscillerating bots
• Fix collision bug (when it collides, it sometimes tries to move through the opponent at the moment)
• Anything I'm interested in. :)

Does it have any White Whales?

At the moment, I hope to make it consistently defeat GlowBlowMelee and Infinity in melee. And, of course, all the top-10. :P

What's it based on

I've written all the code myself. But I would like to give some credits.

• The Stop And Go was inspired by Coriantumr by Kawigi.
• The solo gun has really benefited from his GuessFactor Targeting Tutorial as well.
• The melee dodging is much easier to test thanks to the debugging graphics of Gladiator by KID.
• I've found Diamond by Voidious also very useful to test the solo targeting with because of its graphics. :)