Rankings Stable

It seems that both 1v1 and melee now shows "Rankings Stable" instead of "Rankings Not stable".

I once thought that "Rankings Not Stable" is hardcoded to show that the rankings are never stable so one should always run more battles.

But today is the first time I noticed "Rankings Stable", quite surprising.

So, what's the mechanism behind "Rankings Stable" and "Rankings Not Stable"? Is "Rankings Stable" displayed whenever every bot gets a full pairings?

Your observation coincide with mine. Once all bots paired with each other at least once, the ranking get the stable status. Sometimes it does not happen for a long time because of missing bots or some bots crashing with a newer version of robocode. This is why the participants list sometimes get pruned.

If the ranking is unstable for a long time, I usually look which bot is missing a pair and search for a reason in the rumble client log.

Usually, stabilization takes about a day for each new bot.

Yeah, Monk gets an incorrect url for nearly half a year, making newly updated bots missing that pairing. And in 1v1 there are more bots having problems with current settings (robocode 1.9.2.5 and Java 8).

Should we have a clean up, or create a new rumble to remove bots having compatibility problem, which only adds noice to the rumble?

I personally oscillating between "if the author does not care, why should I?" and "preserve the history". If you are in the second camp, let me remind about my FixingParticipantLinks script which relinks missing bots to strange automata archive.

What is our problem with Java 8? Do we already have bots with Java 9? Or robocode itself is not backward compatible and you see it on big enough robot pull?

My opinion is that as long as a bot works fine on current settings (robocode 1.9.2.5 and Java 8), we should "preserve the history". But once it produces random result (e.g. crashing half of the time), we should remove it (until the author should fix it).

Bots known to crash on some machines:

apc.Caan 1.0
dam.MogBot 2.9
sgp.JollyNinja 3.53

Confirmed, it changes to Stable when all boys have full pairings.