RoboRumble

How do the battles work on Robo Rumble? Do bots play X consecutive rounds against each other or is each paring just one round?

I just want to know if I need to save data at the end of a battle and load for the next battle, or whether there is enough time to learn from scratch each pairing? If its only one round per battle I can't imagine there is much time to populate GF arrays etc?

If I need to save data, do people find problems with the number of bots meaning the data saved has to be very small?

Lastly how do people tend to save data from KNN trees? Or do they not bother?

Cheers!

There are 35 rounds in a standard roborumble battle/pairing. Battles are first done with the priority of filling out the missing pairings, but additional ones after are still done.

From round to round, the proper way to keep data is via use of a static variable in your robot. This is done in almost all robots.

Not that many robots in the rumble save data from battle to battle, and those few that do to my knowledge are usually saving VCS arrays (the amount of data does have to be small per opponent). Saving data between battles is kind of problematic in some ways, because that memory is completely separate between different rumble clients. This means that how the bot ranks, will depend on the number of battles fought per opponent per rumble client, which means it's ranking is less stable and can make it more difficult to evaluate whether a change you made was actually an improvement or not. For that reason, data saving between battles is not worth it IMO. (I'd even go so far as to say that personally I think data saving shouldn't be allowed in the Rumble because of how it makes scores less stable, but that's just my opinion and it is technically allowed)

Ok cool, I wasn't sure if a pairing was one round. 35 makes more sense as thats plenty of time to learn movement & targeting. My bot does save data during a battle between rounds using static data but it doesn't currently save it between battles.

I'll prioritise fast learning over saving data to disk for the moment although I could probably save virtual gun hit rates at a later point.

Whats the consensus on pre-stored data against various opponents? Its that considered bad form or a reasonable plan?

Cheers!

The consensus on the pre-stored data kind of "allowed, but considered cheesy". We have one such example in the Nanorumble (See LBB), and it's generally considered to be an amusing novelty rather than a serious competitor because it does this.

In the upper ranks of the megabot rumble, it would probably be considered bad form unless it's a one-off experiment of "let's see how well this does", which would be considered interesting instead of bad form.