Shielding Success Rates Mystery

I started doing some research on my shielding success rates. I started with a small set including Virus, Seraphim, Hydra, Crusader, and Engineer. I did a first test run of 20 seasons. Shielding success occurred on 20/20, 19/20, 20/20, 20/20, and 13/20 seasons respectively. I know why it's not perfect for Engineer, but the other 4 are the mystery. In the RoboRumble, my success rates on the first 4 are currently 5/8, 5/8, 5/8, and 4/7 respectively.

None of the Rumble losses were run by my machine. But all of them were run using client 1.7.3.0. Losses only occurred when run by Voidious and DivineOmega. I'm guessing there is something common about the machines used by you two that is key. Are you both perhaps running under Linux? Also, what version of Java? I need to replicate one of your machines as closely as possible to explore the problem further.

Maybe their clients are skipping turns. Missed scans hurt bullet shielding a lot.

If they want to check that, they sort-of can. It only reports on the last battle that it happened, but if my robot has any skipped turns, it will write a file xander.cat.XanderCat_SkippedTurns.txt file into it's data directory that has the number of skipped turns printed in it. It's not as useful as it could be since it just reports on the last battle that it happened on, but could be worth a check.

Are the tests you run also using 1.7.3.0? (BTW, I'm doing some major bullet-shielding-suffering at the moment...)

Yes. I run 1.7.3.0 as well.

My rumble clients are on a Core i7-3770 running Ubuntu 12.04 (32-bit), and I think OpenJDK 6 (will check when I get home). Now that you mention it, I recall a similarly huge discrepancy for the original BulletCatcher on an old AMD Ubuntu machine I was using as a rumble client (couldn't find the discussion though). I chalked it up to the different JVM or even the CPU and ended up just retiring the machine as a rumble client, since it was a fraction of my overall CPU power.

My first guess is that when two bullets are close enough to parallel, one JVM's Line2D says they intersect and another doesn't. I actually have Ubuntu 32-bit, 64-bit, and Windows 8 64-bit all on that same machine, so I should be able to do some decent tests for you with only the JVM or OS as a variable.

Found the discussion: Archived_talk:User:Voidious_20110909#Wierd_scores

When the opponent is moving, my robot stands perfectly still (it rotates but doesn't move position). Thus, I haven't verified it, but the two bullets should be perfectly parallel, and this is likely handled differently on different JVMs as Voidious was talking about. However, when both robots are standing still, my shielding shot will miss, so my robot will move slightly when firing a shielding shot against a stationary opponent. I haven't had enough time to figure out what causes this, but I wonder if the answer will give any further clues. I did it this way because it worked, but more investigation is required for me to figure out why.

I could play around with moving slightly for every shielding shot (and moving back right after the shot). I tried this briefly, but found standing still to be more reliable on my machine. But maybe I can tweak it to where it works as well as standing still. If I can, I bet it would avoid the problem.

I will likely need a few more days to play around with this further. In the meantime, if Voidious has time to try out the other JDK, that would answer another piece of the puzzle.

Standing still works because the enemy gun rotation happens after the bullet is fired, so they shoot from a position of 1 tick ago but use their aim from 2 ticks ago. So if they are moving their angle to you changes and they don't quite shoot at your centre, meaning that you can get your bullet line to intersect with theirs because your bullet comes from your centre (which they aren't aiming for). This is also why it stops working when they stand still, because their last position relative to you lines up with their current position relative to you so you end up shooting parallel.

I'm trying to figure out why my super-advanced precise circle-line intersection methods are failing so horribly at getting shield hits. I get one every now and again, but nothing like what I should be based on the maths and shield size I'm calculating, and nothing like the 3/4 of bullets that a simple linear projection + bullet power adaptation was getting.

I would recommend against using Seraphim in a test bed. It is a very buggy robot. So much so that I think it sometimes acts differently in a rumble environment then in a test environment.

But also some versions of Seraphim if I recall add a minor variance to its gun heading it detects it is against a bullet shielder. Is the version your using the same as the one in the rumble? (I expect so, but it cannot hurt to ask.)

After some testing, maybe we can come up with a more consistent implementation for checking bullet collisions / line intersections in the Robocode engine. Here's the relevant code snippet: [1] (line 76 calling line 113).

Here's one that gets rid of the division which I expect is what blows up on poorly conditioned problems:

	private boolean intersect(Line2D.Double line) {
		double x1 = line.x1, x2 = line.x2, x3 = boundingLine.x1, x4 = boundingLine.x2;
		double y1 = line.y1, y2 = line.y2, y3 = boundingLine.y1, y4 = boundingLine.y2;

		double dx13 = (x1 - x3), dx21 = (x2 - x1), dx43 = (x4 - x3);
		double dy13 = (y1 - y3), dy21 = (y2 - y1), dy43 = (y4 - y3);

		double dn = dy43 * dx21 - dx43 * dy21;
                double dn_sign = Math.signum(dn);
                double dn_abs = dn*dn_sign;

		double ua = (dx43 * dy13 - dy43 * dx13) * dn_sign;
		double ub = (dx21 * dy13 - dy21 * dx13) * dn_sign;

		return (ua >= 0 && ua <= dn_abs) && (ub >= 0 && ub <= dn_abs);
	}

It might even be faster, divisions are about the same speed as sqrt.

Given that it is using it's own code to determine intersection rather than a JVM method, I wonder if the discrepancy between systems is actually in the data stored in the line objects.

I thought maybe I could tweak it using a small amount of movement to make it work on all systems, but so far my attempts have degraded shielding performance unacceptably. One bit of good news -- I tested and found out that Robocode security does not prohibit robots from reading System properties, so if I can figure out how to correct (at least partially) for the problem on other OSs or JVMs, I can test for them and just make those changes on the appropriate systems.

When I experimented with bullet shielding, my bot calculated minimum and maximum angles which would hit an incoming bullet, and only shoot if the difference between angles was above a threshold. It was there to work around floating point calculation errors, which translate into "parallel" bullets.

If the difference is below the threshold, then moving sideways helps increase the difference. Near 100% bullet shield against TrackFire. But against moving opponents and/or weak powered bullets, sometimes my bot moved until it crashed on the wall, never finding a good angle to shoot. And this is where my experiments are stuck right now.

Tonight I ran a test on one of my servers in my basement. The OS on it is Fedora 13. I installed Open JDK 6 (command su -c "yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel"). Once installed, it reports itself as:

OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8.8) (fedora-51.1.8.8.fc13-i386) OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)

I ran a number of battles and have yet to encounter any shielding failures using XanderCat 12.2. But I need to do a more thorough test to be sure. Tomorrow I will set up RoboJogger and run a bigger series of tests.

Just checked and I'm also on OpenJDK 6:

java version "1.6.0_24"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11.5) (6b24-1.11.5-0ubuntu1~12.04.1)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 20.0-b12, mixed mode)

Sorry I didn't get to any real testing today, but I will tomorrow. Now I'm really curious to see if I see the same in another JVM or in Windows...