Archived talk:User:Rednaxela 2012-05-16

Music and Inspiration

I must say... there's nothing quite like watching Robocode battles while listening to something like this. Recently I haven't had time for robocoding, but I have been watching some battles along with music, and it seems to be working well for giving me inspiration/ideas of some things to try in winter break... :) -- Rednaxela

Slow Algorithms

Well then... I set up some code to via brute force calculate nearly all possible ways a bot could move (restricts turning to 3 possible values and acceleration to integers) within a given amount of time. To calculate for 10 ticks it took about 1 second, which is very good for my purposes. To calculate for 20 ticks however... it didn't seem to stop even after hours so I calculated roughly how long it would take with my algorithm that got 1 second for 10 ticks and it turns out that for 20 ticks would take at least 110 years!!! Wowzers... looks like I'll have to diverge from brute force and work with some methods that drastically reduce calculation at the cost of significant approximation... --Rednaxela 16:07, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Those exponential algorithms =S, maybe instead of approximating you could prune branches of your search tree, a lot of states will be very similar and some others will have low probability. Hope it gives ideas to improve your algorithm. --zyx 23:42, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, for my purposes, pruning low probability states would be unacceptable, however I am planning to redesign it so it can prune sufficently similar (or exactly the same if I can afford it?) states of each tick. The memory requirement will unavoidably be drasticaly increased however in order to make non-recursive as that would require. Hopefully that memory requirement increase won't get too high. I intend to make these calculation for at least 100 ticks so yeah... Hopefully I won't need to borrow a supercomputer to get SaphireSlippers on the road... --Rednaxela 02:06, 27 January 2009 (UTC)