On removing bots worse than SittingDuck
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There are a few bots doing worse than sample.SittingDuck, but imo we should keep them, at least not removing them in one step.
1. Removing a lot of bots in roborumble in a short period of time disables the comparation between different versions of every bot in APS, survival, PWIN, etc. As they all depends highly on the distribution of the participants. Doing so makes the recorded APS, Survival and PWIN in version history completely useless, and you can't even reload the scores as the score against those removed bots are always counted in inactive versions.
2. They are a great indicator of whether your bot has some serious bug that happens rarely. And we DO need enough weak bots to have the chance to trigger it.
3. They don't waste time in roborumble as they die too fast, making a battle almost done immediately.
OK, reduce load is good.
Anyway, I think we should not remove any bot except your own without discussion, unless those bots are violating rules or completely broken (e.g. invalid package).
Now, maybe we may add another rule: If your bot is worse than sample.SittingDuck, it may have some serious errors, therefore may be removed to reduce load for everyone who runs roborumble.
There are also some bots that try to do as badly as possible, so do worse than SittingDuck by not getting survival bonus etc.
WoW that's amazing
Now I'm considering a new bot that ranks the last in the rumble. aaa.WorstBot. I think I can use ReversedWaveSurfing to make sure the enemy hit me 100%, and when he is not firing or ramming, go hit the wall and hit and hit and hit the wall, while avoiding ramming into the opponent accidentally.
The reversed rumble is as interesting as the normal one, I think we should permit this.
Well, may be I removed them somewhat hasty. But I get tired fixing broken download links, and was looking for excuse to trim the list. If authors do not care about their bots why should I? Though, among the removed ones, I think only Galaxy was with a broken link.
We do need a procedure to remove dangling links bots. Without it the rating will be in "unstable" state forever. Look at the rumble [1] quite a lot of bots missing about 10 pairings rigth now (2017/09/07). Why? Because opponents are not downloadable.
There are bots which comunity would always take care: former champions, open source bots, and bots which have wikipage describing their logic. I.e. the ones from wich we can learn. But if it has no wiki page, closed source, and its link is expired so it blocks ratings stabilization, then I tempted to come with a big eraser.
1. I would still encourage the removal of the "worst" bot from the main rumble. Everybody get 100% against them, so they do not change resulting APS too much, since there are only handful of them. If we want to compete in being the "worst", we can start a separate rumble.
2. We might worry about APS change which is used for comparison. But it will be different anyway because there are always (well often) a new bot or new version of bot entering the competition, so old APS is slowly loosing its value anyway.