Trying New Rumbles

Do you mind if I try submitting results for some different rumble configs? I could setup my own instance of this at home or something if you'd rather. I'm thinking of finally seeing what a StrongestBotsRumble might look like, or a PerceptualRumble.

No problem. Just don't put more than one client on at the moment, or it will probably go over write quota. I'm currently working my way up through all the pairings of the roborumble with 4 clients on an i5, and filling out pairings for the first time is probably the worst as far as writes go because every single bot gets writes evenly, so caching between writes doesn't help particularly. Because of this I currently have caching on quite aggressively, I will lower it in a while. The problem with excessive caching is that occasionally the changes made in the bots get evicted from memcache and the frontend instance gets shut down/cycled, so some battles might be lost. Don't worry, everything will stabilise in the end, and it should be robust to any problems with lost battles on one pairing but not the other, etc.

If it does hit write quota it will reset at 07h00 UTC. You will start getting messages from your client that writes are failing, again don't worry, they will get written once the quota rolls around if they are still available in memcache or instance memory. Batch rankings (currently just Vote, ie. BestBot) get recalculated at 22h00 UTC.

Here's a sample client config: roborumble.txt

Enjoy!

Btw, what's your goal with filling out the 1v1 pairings? Just as a test to see how they compare to Darkcanuck's, or are you planning to try and keep this instance up to date with new RoboRumble activity?

Once they're full I want to try out some different scoring mechanisms - in particular I want to try out my Average Normalised Pairs Percentage. I also want to see what the KNN-PBI looks like for the main rumble. I'm not sure I want to keep a ~900 bot rumble permanently updated - it would eat into the free quota quite a bit. The same with the melee rumble. They is better suited for Darkcanuck's server IMO.

I think it would be more interesting to have a few others, like the PerceptualRumble or TripleDuel/TwinMelee, but I don't want to run any rumbles with more than 100-200 bots on a long term basis. They are just too slow to stabilise, and chances are that the majority of the bots have been abandoned anyways. Perhaps the next step is to write an app that serves the participants list as a FIFO - automatically kicking out old bots as new ones are entered (although not counting versions as new bots).