Thanks for opening the code

Hi, Thanks for opening the code. I am looking forward to digest it. One question, I noticed that many bot have booleans labeled TC and MC. Are these for target and movement challenges? If so where is the bots collection and who runs the challenge?

These flags are for competing in the challenges, not for being part of a challenge. So putting TC=true disables the movement, and MC=true disables the gun.

Although maybe I misunderstood you, the following are where it is used: movement challenges: Movement Challenge and Movement Challenge 2K6, targeting challenges: Targeting Challenge, Targeting Challenge 2K6 and Targeting Challenge 2K7.

You run the battles yourself using something like RoboResearch, which puts out the results in a wiki-friendly format.

Also Targeting Challenge RM, which I think is the most useful one.

And also RoboRunner / RoboJogger has some advantages over RoboResearch, the main one being a big speed increase because it doesn't restart the JVM after every match.

Yes, you understood me right. I've seen the pages about those challenges in the wiki, but since I jump the train to late, I missed the discussion of their purpose. Which, I am guessing, are to tune guns and movements separately. But on those pages, I've seen long tables with ranking, so I thought they were created by some sort of a statistics bot, like we have with rumble now.

Also, I am big fan of RoboRunner. I just need to find a proper subset of bots to correlate its results with the full rumble. I sometimes see an improvement vs. my local subset and a drop in a rumble.

Oh, right, I remember seeing that you used RoboRunner, which made me happy. :-)

The targeting challenges I consider pretty useful and a good predictor of rumble performance. The movement challenges, less so. My most useful Robocode testing was usually against large test beds constructed with BedMaker. I updated it in July to work with LiteRumble, if you want to give it a try.

I should try it, but the question is which bots to choose? Assuming incremental improvements, should I aim to gain vs top bots or similar score ones?

The reason I ask for your wisdom is the following. I recall once I gain a couple of points against top bots, but the score was worse for majority of the medium and lower bots. This happens when I added more advance guns to be dodged to an enemy bot. This helped against top bots, but weaker bots gained on me. I still puzzled by it.

So ideal test bed, should have a representative from each group.

Also, a side note. I noticed that Diamond sometimes get disabled right at the beginning of the game. Most likely some minor bug but if you fix it, you might get to the 1st place. I think this bug happens only in melee.

The one movement challenge which I found was a good indicator of rumble performance was the MC2K7, since there you have a gun (everybody has the same gun), and your opponent moves, so you have the same incentives to improve as in the actual rumble.