Talk:Twin Duel

Name of competition

I was under the impression that the official name of this competition was "TwinDuel", all one word (like RoboRumble is all one word). That's how it appears on the Main Page, and Voidious never complained. « AaronR « Talk « 21:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd agree. What's your view Voidious? :) --Rednaxela 22:12, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm not sure I have a strong opinion either way. ;) We named a lot of things as one word like that on the old wiki because it auto-linked words with InterCaps, but that's not the case in MediaWiki. As a comparison, I think calling it "Wave Surfing" with a space now makes sense, but then again, old habits die hard. I just don't know! :-P Obviously, whichever it is, the other should forward to it anyway... --Voidious 18:58, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Resurrection

I've had the Twin Duel on my mind a bit lately. Tonight I finally got around to looking at my tourney automation code, which has been broken for quite a while due to changes to the robocode.control API. (I ran the Twin Duel on Robocode 1.07 for a really long time.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to get the new control API working! I deleted several classes and a bunch of code and replaced it with just a few lines of new code. I ran quite a few tests and all is working well. So I can run Twin Duels again if there's interest. And with VoidBot, I could actually setup something to automatically upload the results to the wiki, too. =)

--Voidious 01:58, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ooh.. interesting... though I likely probably won't get involved in Twin Duel again any time shortly, as I really want to get my melee megabot out there and there's no way it could be adapted to Twin Duel. Still though, neat :) --Rednaxela 02:44, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

My offer still stands to help integrate TwinDuel into the rumble (as a new game type). The server side should be easy but the client will also need some changes. --Darkcanuck 05:27, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

That would be awesome. I think it's a really cool format that could garner a lot of interest with its own rumble. There's so many non-standard rules for the Twin Duel that we should probably discuss which we might drop for the rumble version - I'll make a separate section for that. I'd be happy to look at the required client-side changes, but I'm not too familiar with that code as of now. --Voidious 13:54, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

What I like on TwinDuel is that it is a tournament. It looks better for me than rumble-style, even though PL would be similar to. Because it is about luck too in tournament. If you are second to best team in PL, you might lose at the first if you met the best team. » Nat | Talk » 14:02, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

On my side I've been kind of sad I wasn't around for Twin Duel times, so I would probably do some work there before Melee or Team. But I have near to zero experience on both team and melee, so it will probably take me some time to get some decent working code. --zyx 07:13, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it was definitely a lot of fun, especially when there was a lot of activity (like right when it started). It was really cool to see the rapid evolution of the metagame in a new format, something most of us (myself included) kind of missed out on for standard 1v1 / Melee. I'd also be interested in trying some other new formats if there's interest (Hat League has been discussed before). --Voidious 13:54, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ooh... I forgot about Hat League... I'd certainly be interesting in making my new melee bot capable of running with Hat League out of the box if a few others expressed interest in it... :) --Rednaxela 14:44, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd definitely be interested in joining Hat League. :) --Positive 14:48, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

What about PointBlank Competition? » Nat | Talk » 15:08, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Alright, I see no reason not to start running this again. It's OK if there's no new entries for a little while. Does anybody have a strong preference on the schedule? I think running it Thursday while I'm at work would be good for me. So deadline would be like Wednesday nights and results Thursday evenings. Thoughts? --Voidious 15:44, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I would like if you can start it now. I have Wednesday off this week, should be able to finish a team. » Nat | Talk » 16:07, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Rumble edition

Darkcanuck has offered to help create a TwinDuelRumble. The weekly format has its own charm (and maybe we could keep it, too?), but having a real rumble would be awesome.

The Twin Duel has a few non-standard rules. (Until it's migrated, see oldwiki:TwinDuel.) We might want/need to change some of them for the rumble version.

• No writing to or reading from files is allowed.
• Survivalist / PL scoring. The score is based on survival firsts, and only win/loss (not score %).
• Battles are 75 rounds.
• Code Size < 2000. Obtained by running the code size utility on the team's .jar file.

My thoughts:

• I say we just use the honor system for the file access rule, or drop it.
• Keep the code size limit the same.
• I say we keep the 75 round battles, but I don't see much problem with 35. One battle carries less weight in a rumble.
• The weird scoring is the big issue. The Twin Duel scoring doesn't match any of the current styles of rumble scoring. My ideal vision of the scoring would be:
  • PL: Wins and losses based on survival firsts, not regular score or survival score. This would be the default ranking.
  • APS: Based on survival firsts / total rounds instead of score / total score.
  • Glicko-2/ELO: If included, based on the above style of APS.

What do you guys think?

--Voidious 15:39, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

That should works, I think. I like the honor system, there shouldn't much team in the rumble that we can't randomly check it. But I wonder about codesize, the client is hard-coded on that one. » Nat | Talk » 16:01, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Ideally I don't want the scoring to get too exotic. I think replacing the "standard" APS with %survival firsts / # rounds should be ok; the PL scoring and Glicko2/ELO rankings would then follow from that using the existing algorithms. The client will need to be updated to do the codesize check (although this could be based on the honour system too). --Darkcanuck 16:13, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

That would rock! I'm not sure what you mean by "too exotic", but what you describe sounds perfect and would be everything we need, imo. --Voidious 17:20, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I have the basics of this working on my test server. I've swapped the APS and survival scores so that survival is used for ELO/Glicko2/PL. No need to update the client after all, unless we want to add a codesize check. Can go live tonight if you want to give it a whirl... --Darkcanuck 16:37, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Sweet! I'm still not sure how the survival score works in team games (ie, if that's equivalent to "Survival Firsts"), I'll have to investigate. I should have some time tonight or tomorrow to do some testing. So I'd just configure a twinrumble.txt based on teamrumble.txt, modify to use 800x800 battlefield, different participants URL and temp files, 75 rounds, and (maybe?) point it at your test server? --Voidious 17:14, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm trying to package one of my twins since summer and every time I package it it doesn't give a version to it. I'm using Robocode 1.9.3.0 and the version I've entered is 1.0.

I got an issue trying to repackage NightAndDay, it kept the old version instead of the new one I gave. Maybe there is a Robocode bug with this? I suggest reporting the bug on Sourceforge and in the mean time you can work around it by manually editing the .team file.

Anyone know where to download this team? I seem to have lost it :-p

Here: [1]

Got that from RoboRumble/Participants/TwinDuel. We also have TwinDuel rumble rankings now, though not too many new entrants: [2]

Oh and welcome back. ;)