BerryBots updates
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So I try not to spam you guys too much about BerryBots, but maybe I'll post about some of the bigger stuff.
A couple people have posted bots on the forums recently (both Robocoders):
- Frohman posted the first public bot, Insolitus, a battle bot that beats supersample.BasicBattler in 1v1 and draws about even with it in Melee (which means it also crushes the other samples). Some type of antigravity movement and linear targeting.
- Justin (of DemonicRage) has a bot called NightShade. It's the strongest 1v1 bot for now, also supports races and mazes, and has pretty sexy debugging graphics.
Next big thing coming is the Game Runner API, which I'm pretty excited about. I have it working now, probably releasing it in a week or two with some polish and related changes to results handling. Some cool things are that it handles multi-threading for you and makes it really easy to prompt the user for inputs (seasons, threads, ships, stages, etc). You launch a Game Runner script through the app kind of like starting a battle.
Just released v1.2.0 with the Game Runner API. I think it holds up pretty well in a comparison against the Robocode control API - it handles multi-threading under the covers, lets you configure input parameters and prompt the user for those fields with a graphical dialog, and includes some examples that do basic batch battles or a single-elimination tournament.
- Video overview
- BerryBots v1.2.0 details
- batchduels.lua gives a good idea how easily you can implement a basic multi-threaded batch battle runner.
I feel like this was the final prerequisite to the kind of real bot development like I'm used to. So I'm pretty stoked on that. :-)
And now that Game Runner is out, I added a leaderboard for the LaserGallery stage. Might work on a gun myself sometime soon: LaserGallery/Scores
This is pretty cool - HTML5 replays: 6-bot melee on battle1
(Sorry, seems broken on Linux/FireFox, still troubleshooting that one.)
I finally got around to writing a learning gun for BerryBots. At first I was just out to port Rednaxela's kd-tree to Lua, since I thought that was a prerequisite to the gun I wanted, and a prerequisite to testing correctness of a kd-tree is writing an optimized linear KNN search. But once I had a linear KNN search, I realized it would be plenty fast enough to run the targeting challenge stage, which is only a few thousand ticks per enemy with a decent gun, so I built out the rest of the gun.
So it's mostly just KNN with waves / displacement vectors. A precise MEA and GuessFactors is probably worth pursuing. But I think the next thing to start to handle is the presence of walls, which has a lot of ramifications.
It came out pretty good: testgun.lua. Not much code, runs pretty fast, reasonably effective. And it's a new high score on Laser Gallery.
Ahh, neat.
With regards to handling the presence of walls, that's a case where I see the utility of PIF versus displacement vectors and guessfactors as being significant. Guessfactors aren't really well-suited to the presence of walls. Displacement vectors allow you to handle walls occluding where they end up. PIF however allows you to handle not only walls occluding where they end up, but also handle ruling out paths which would be interrupted by walls.
