Smart bots competition

Increasing Processing Time Debate

Overall, the idea of increasing the processing time per turn for bots in the robocode engine is met with mixed reactions. Some see it as an opportunity to implement more complex strategies, such as better movement algorithms or enemy simulators. Others argue that the potential gains from these slower algorithms may be outweighed by the increased time needed for testing and development. Some suggest that a "FastBots" league, with a more reliable and stable control over processing limits, may be a more viable solution. Ultimately, it seems that the community is divided on whether or not increasing processing time would lead to significant improvements in bot performance.

— ChatGPT

As we know, there is hard (bad badly controlled) maximum processing time per turn allowed per bot imposed by the robocode engine. This pushes all of us to do the best in the allocated time limit. But as result some of potentially better but slower strategies do not show up at the top of the rating.

I am looking for a way to set/control allowed calculation time per in the rumble clients, in a hope to find the best among slow and wise bots. So we can start new rumble codenamed "wise slopokes". Additionally, it may spark new wave of interest among the kings of the rating authors.

What do you all think about this idea?

I like the idea of more processing time in order to attempt more complex stats, but to be honest I've tried some pretty complex stuff (including Spectral Clustering) for KNN on recorded data and nothing has beat simple KNN with a square kernel and weighted on sample distance. Not to mention that a lot of these algorithms aren't just a constant 50x slower or whatever, they essentially become unsolvable at sizes above ~500 data points, scaling quadratically or worse.

A problem with unlimited processing time is that it becomes possible to simply keep a copy of other bots and simulate them to determine where they will shoot/move.

Does anybody have any specific techniques that they would use if there was more processing time available?

I personally was aiming to a better movement algorithm. I.e. one can do better than 1 or 2 wave surfing. That would be super critical in melee, where you can track/react/predict more than just the closest bot.

Idea of enemy simulator is also attractive. I personally do not like clustering algorithms, I would rather prefer emulate and distill a subset of physically possible and optimal tracks for a current situation.

A clustering algorithm probably would seize to work once you apply it in melee, since you have to account for a neighboring bot subset as an input.I would think this would drastically increase the problem dimensions.

Displacement vectors of Voidious would be the closest to real emulation but it is still just an approximation.

I had some movement algorithm things in the works, and they would have been more straightforward to implement with more processing time sure, but half the fun so to speak was coming up with the right optimization strategies to make it very fast.

Honestly, overall I don't feel like higher per-tick processing time would be too helpful at this point. My reasoning is, high level Robocode tends to require a very large amount of automated testing to know if some tuning was was actually an improvement or not. If the processing time limit was increased, it would also increase how long that testing takes.

Basically, I think the potential gains from slower algorithms are outweighed by the gains of faster iterations during tuning/development.

If anything I'd be more interested in a "FastBots" league, except I think the engine's control over the processing limit is too unreliable/unstable for that to be reasonable.

Well I wouldn't mind implementing full and proper n-wave surfing, right now Nene just does 2 wave surfing in simple way. Full n-wave would be very time consuming to calculate. But I am unsure of any major improvement it would bring to movement.

Slow but functional class of algorithms would be Monte Carlo methods. The more time you give them, the stronger they become.