Weird rumble scores

You are right. Apart from creating many thrads that do a lot of work when it’s others turn, creating a lot of objects to increase GC overhead does affect others’ bots as well, making the result a little bit random.

But I doubt how much difference can GC overhead put. The most unreproducible scores I experienced are always coming from some rare exceptions, say 1/1000. And once happened, it causes some random pairing to be close to 0. If averaged with some normal score, it really looked like it’s decreasing with no reason.

But there’s always some reason, and mostly coming from specific bot instead of the clients, since not everyone is affected.

So my advice is that you output exceptions to file, and check if there are any. Skipped turns could also be counted. I was doing this in older bots as well, and concluded that GC overhead & skipped turns aren’t really the problem, but exceptions are.

I think there must have been a bad client running at some point. BeepBoop 0.14a is identical to 0.14, but is getting 0.3 points better in the rumble now. Even weirder, I just noticed that BeepBoop 0.13 has 85% against eem.awful, which disables itself at the beginning of each battle!

Let’s wait more battles, if the score goes down to some similar APS after ~30000 battles, then every body’s client is fine.