BedMaker

Sure, here you go - I made a second with the same parameters in case you hit errors with any of the bots, or they're super slow, and you want to swap some out by hand: [1] [2] One nice thing bedmaker does is copy just those bots into roboresearch/robocode_bots, so I guess you'll have to just copy your whole rumble/robots dir in there unless you want to write a script or something. =)

That seems like a good cross-section to test general rumble performance. I hate wasting CPU cycles re-running battles with almost no variance, like bots I score 99+ against, but at the same time you have to be careful not to specialize too much on the bots you have lots of room for improvement against. I certainly haven't mastered the art of choosing test beds, but big test beds across a large section of the rumble seem pretty safe. They'll at least show you pretty quickly when you've really screwed up. =)

Thanks!

How many seasons do you usually run something like this for?

Lately I've been running ~2000 battles, which seems accurate to within 0.05 or 0.1. That's made easier now that I can do that in 2-2.5 hours on my new machine, though - previously it was taking me 2+ hours for one season of a 250-bot test bed!

So you'll have to feel it out for yourself as far as your bot and what changes you're making (and how patient you are =)). Like with some changes, I just want to know it's not totally screwing things up before testing it in the rumble. While tweaking parameters little by little, I have to run a lot more battles to know what's going on.

2000 seasons??? *brain explodes!!*

No no no, 2000 battles total. =) So for this test bed, like 13 seasons. My current test bed is 400 bots and I'm doing 5-6 seasons.

Excellent! After culling a few bots that were throwing BufferedInputStream errors (seems like it was bots that like to output to the external Robocode terminal instead of their own System.out) It's cranking away.

Is there a convenient way to view RoboResearch output for test beds this big other than copying to wiki? That results window is awfully crowded. :)

Thanks so much for the help, Voidious!

No problem! I don't know, my test beds are usually either so big that I only check the overall score, or so small (like my 5 worst matchups) that I can just remember the order. =) RoboResearch also has a GUI which probably has nicer output, but IIRC it puts all the scores on one line, which might be a few thousand pixels wide with 150 bots.

Oh, "results window", maybe you are using the GUI? I use the command line ("CLI"), which I like, but it seems most people do prefer the GUI.

All I've got is "gui.sh" and "run.sh" and run.sh doesn't do anything.

Okay. Hacked together a "cli.sh" using "gui.sh" as a template.

Problem I have now is how do I pass the challenger's name to the command line? That space between the bot name and the bot version number keeps getting me...

./cli.sh -S -C challenges/debroglie1.rrc -c tjk.deBroglie rev0108 -r 35 -s 10

fouls up on the bot name. Using the jar file doesn't seem to work either.

EDIT: Nevermind. Got it. ;)

You should be able to just put it in quotes. I have a di.sh with a commands like: java -cp bin:hsqldb.jar roboResearch.CLI -S -t 6 -c "voidious.Diamond 1.7.56.x1" di1.cfg

Quotes didn't work because quotes get a bit mangled when passing from one bash script to another. I just went ahead and called java directly. Now I have a terminal window running the RoboResearch server, and three windows each chugging away on bots. (rev108 and two changes to surf wave timing and MEA predict timing. Probably veeeery small changes there. Oh well.)

It's going though. Woot!

Is it bad to run two of these simultaneously out of the same directory. The CLI is needing lots of babysitting because of stuff like

Thead 1: Unrecognized output from robocode, "Got an error with alex.Diabolo5: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: alex.Diabolo5". Killing battle.

followed with lots of java.io.IOException stuff.

I'm not sure, I always run one challenge at a time with the max threads I'm willing to use ("-t 6" for 6 threads). That error does sound like they might be stepping on each other's toes.

Oddly enough, using the -t tag for more threads causes problems for me...

(Running using server) Result for robot named "tjk.deBroglie rev0115 (2)". Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1 at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1949) at roboResearch.engine.Result.<init>(Result.java:31) at roboResearch.engine.BattleResults.load(BattleResults.java:42) at roboResearch.engine.BattleResults.load(BattleResults.java:24) at roboResearch.engine.BattleRunner.run(BattleRunner.java:107) at roboResearch.CLI.run(CLI.java:94) at roboResearch.CLI.<init>(CLI.java:69) at roboResearch.CLI.main(CLI.java:38)

Hmm, weird. Well, I don't know if this is the issue, but the instructions say when you use -t, you should also start the SQL DB separately and pass -S. The command to start the DB is:

java -Xmx1024M -cp hsqldb.jar org.hsqldb.Server -database.0 file:roboresearch -dbname.0 roboresearch

So I do that, then run with "-S -t 6" and it works. That "tjk.deBroglie rev0115 (2)" almost seems like you have two of that bot/version in a battle against itself, though - is that the case? Not sure if I've tried that or if it would cause issues.

Yeah, I've got the -S flag in there and have the server running in a separate terminal. Here's the whole thing:

tom@gecko ~/RoboResearch $ java -Xmx512M -cp bin:hsqldb.jar roboResearch.CLI -S -t 3 -C challenges/debroglie1.rrc -c "tjk.deBroglie rev0116" -r 35 -s 14

Challenge Specifications:

Challenge: deBroglierev108 150-57-95

Bot: tjk.deBroglie rev0116

Alias: null

Rounds: 35

Threads: 3

Type: null

Seasons: 14


(Running using server)

Result for robot named "tjk.deBroglie rev0116 (2)".

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: -1

at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1949)

at roboResearch.engine.Result.<init>(Result.java:31)

at roboResearch.engine.BattleResults.load(BattleResults.java:42)

at roboResearch.engine.BattleResults.load(BattleResults.java:24)

at roboResearch.engine.BattleRunner.run(BattleRunner.java:107)

at roboResearch.CLI.run(CLI.java:94)

at roboResearch.CLI.<init>(CLI.java:69)

at roboResearch.CLI.main(CLI.java:38)

Strange. I've been using the prepackaged one linked at the wiki here. Maybe I'll get the latest one via SVN and work around the build instructions that refer to nonexistent files.

And single threaded works, or the GUI? That's so odd. I know the code base a little and it seems like that path should execute the same across all of them. Or did you figure it out?

Single threaded works great.. same command line with the "-t 3" omitted.

Maybe having to do with the fact that I'm using OpenJDK? Do you use the Sun/Oracle JRE/JDK ?

I'm also using OpenJDK, on Ubuntu 12.04. (And previously the Apple JVM on a Mac.) The line that's failing is trying to parse the bot name from a line that, I think, would look like "1: tkiesel.deBroglie rev0116". If you want to hack on the RoboResearch source, you may be able to get a better picture. I would wonder if it's something about the Robocode version, except that it's working in those other configurations...

Yeah.. OpenJDK on Linux Mint 13 here, which is based on Ubuntu 12.04. Much the same running environment.

It looks like you have an extra space in the bot name, the " (2)". Could that be the issue?

Feel free to inspect the actual command I entered; I pasted it up above.

java -Xmx512M -cp bin:hsqldb.jar roboResearch.CLI -S -t 3 -C challenges/debroglie1.rrc -c "tjk.deBroglie rev0116" -r 35 -s 14

has problems while

java -Xmx512M -cp bin:hsqldb.jar roboResearch.CLI -S -C challenges/debroglie1.rrc -c "tjk.deBroglie rev0116" -r 35 -s 14

does not.

What's odd is that the lines that declare what config will be running (before the actual battles start) seem to indicate that the bot name was read correctly. Again, as I pasted above:

Challenge: deBroglierev108 150-57-95

Bot: tjk.deBroglie rev0116

Alias: null

Rounds: 35

Threads: 3

Type: null

Seasons: 14

But then, a moment later, RoboResearch has " (2)" appended to the end of the bot name. Very odd.

I think the (2) is appended to the bot name because it was a battle with two of the same bot. But I don't understand how RoboResearch could have gotten confused enough for that to happen. I think Skilgannon is right that it's confusing the parsing going on in BattleResults.load, though I can't exactly follow how (because I'm not too familiar with the format of the output it parses).

I'd really like to modify RoboResearch to use the Robocode control API, or write a new batch battle runner that does. RoboResearch runs a battle in a fresh Robocode instance each time from a .battle file and parses the results from the output. I recently tinkered with this - starting a new JVM each time is a lot more painful when you're running 1-round battles, like I was for my perceptual gun =). And I realized it requires a separate Robocode install for each thread, or you hit concurrency exceptions reading in JARs. RoboResearch makes use of a debug property that starts Robocode with a different "working directory" so each thread can load bots from a different directory, but there's really no way to do that for separate threads using the Robocode control API. (Not that it's a big deal to have a bunch of full Robocode installs, but it would make the change to RoboResearch quite a bit more complicated.) Also, the SQL db it uses slows down a lot once you have a lot of results in there, forcing me to manually clear it from time to time. I'm sure there's a better solution.