GoTo surfing.

Point 2 - I just use an arraylist for first wave points and another for second wave points. Put the first through Collections.sort() then iterate through. At each point calculate the min reachable second wave danger. However, if the first wave danger is more than the min first+second then break. I'm not sure why a hashmap would even help here?

Have you checked that your JVM is the same version for both? And CPU constant? 64 bit might be better at the raw throughput for the benchmark but about the same for stuff with lots of decisions in it, like a bot.

Actually 64-bit would probably be worse in some things too. Specifically, 64-bit mode means pointers take twice as much memory, thus effectively doubling memory bandwidth requirements for code that spends most of it's cpu time dealing with pointers between objects. For the case of robocode bots, deep recursive data structures are not too uncommon, and additionally Java is more subject to this problem than compiled object oriented languages, because Java doesn't allow non-reference composition of classes.

Hmm. What I do is pre-calculate a whole bunch of points by precise predicting until a few ticks after the second wave has hit. Then I use these points as 'destinations' for my goto algorithm. Each point holds its own danger value, and this danger is the one used if the point is 'reachable', otherwise I calculate a new danger for whatever location the wave hits me at. That way I never run into problems with duplicate points, association etc.