Rankings Stable

It seems that both 1v1 and melee now shows "Rankings Stable" instead of "Rankings Not stable".

I once thought that "Rankings Not Stable" is hardcoded to show that the rankings are never stable so one should always run more battles.

But today is the first time I noticed "Rankings Stable", quite surprising.

So, what's the mechanism behind "Rankings Stable" and "Rankings Not Stable"? Is "Rankings Stable" displayed whenever every bot gets a full pairings?

Your observation coincide with mine. Once all bots paired with each other at least once, the ranking get the stable status. Sometimes it does not happen for a long time because of missing bots or some bots crashing with a newer version of robocode. This is why the participants list sometimes get pruned.

If the ranking is unstable for a long time, I usually look which bot is missing a pair and search for a reason in the rumble client log.

Usually, stabilization takes about a day for each new bot.

I personally oscillating between "if the author does not care, why should I?" and "preserve the history". If you are in the second camp, let me remind about my FixingParticipantLinks script which relinks missing bots to strange automata archive.

What is our problem with Java 8? Do we already have bots with Java 9? Or robocode itself is not backward compatible and you see it on big enough robot pull?

My opinion is that as long as a bot works fine on current settings (robocode 1.9.2.5 and Java 8), we should "preserve the history". But once it produces random result (e.g. crashing half of the time), we should remove it (until the author should fix it).

Bots known to crash on some machines:

apc.Caan 1.0
dam.MogBot 2.9
sgp.JollyNinja 3.53

I've been away for quite some time and I'll probably come back once I graduate. I still care about my bots, though (despite Monk being buggy as hell atm). I used to make use of Drive to provide the links, but I didn't know they would break after some time. What would you guys suggest me to do? Is the solution proposed above (fix script) sufficient for now?

Well, do not trust the modern hype i.e. a cloud. But I guess you already know it.

If you cannot host your bot yourself. Put it in the cloud, usually within a day or earlier appears at [archive]. Then just update the link to point there. I think, as of now, it is the most reliable way. Many thanks to Rednaxela for this effort.

I actually think that hosting it by myself looks like way less reliable than using such consolidated service. But yeah, I'll do what you suggested.

Well, in this case, the drive works totally fine ;)

Just have a look at this commit: http://robowiki.net/w/index.php?title=RoboRumble/Participants/Melee&diff=52900&oldid=52879

Confirmed, it changes to Stable when all bots have full pairings.

If you find a bot that repeatedly crashes IMO remove it from the rumble and out it in the list below. If the author has a page make a comment and hopefully they will fix it.