Testbed
The highlighted comment was created in this revision.
For the first time since 2004, I have assembled a testbed, but now I notice something I had not though about on beforehand. Some bots like Phoenix and ad.Quest, save data and that could have influence on the outcome. Do you use data-saving bots in your testbed and if so, how do you arrange that every version starts with a clean sheet against those. I want to alter my 40-bot testbed anyway, because 1 run (35 rounds) takes about 30-35 minutes. I still use a single core 2.66 GHz P4, although I have a i7 8-core laptop from work available. --GrubbmGait 14:39, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
I do use data saving bots and am just ignoring the issue right now, actually, which is perhaps stupid. But it should be pretty easy to modify RoboResearch to delete the robot.database and .data after every season, so they get rebuilt and saved data is cleared. That would be a very nice option to have. Are you using RoboResearch?
One little note, is another option would be perhaps to modify RoboResearch to enable the option in new versions of Robocode, to obfuscate/randomize enemy names?
I thought that would return a consistent name for the same bot each time, just preventing you from pre-load bot-specific behavior? I started browsing the code just now to try and say for sure, but I wasn't able to uncover the answer as quickly as I'd hoped...
A wait... it looks like the "anonymous names" are just like "#1" and "#2" according to their position in the participants in the battle... That's unfortunate, because because unlike randomized ones, that would really confuse data saving robots by giving them polluted results.
See "getAnnonymousName()" in net.sf.robocode.host.RobotStatics
On second thoughts, it is not really an issue. Most bots that save data do it for each version separate. Only bots like cx.BlestPain that save data without version information I should remove from my testbed. And ofcourse regularly removing the contents of 'working_dirs'. Any tips about contents of the testbed? I now selected 10 of my 20 worst White Wales, 10 bots out of the top-30, and 20 bots ranging from 40-140 with a PBI close to zero. Still busy with 30 seasons for 30 minutes each, sigh. --GrubbmGait 19:24, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
