Talk:RoboRumble/Participants

Why it still have "No chatting on this page. Use the /ParticipantsChat page for that."? We can have this discussion page for chat. » Nat | Talk » 05:11, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Entering rumble via infobox

You know, it would be kinda cool if people could enter their robots in the rumble via Template:Infobox Robot. Just add the appropriate data to the box and an argument that says, effectively, "Yes, enter my bot in the rumble," and boom, it gets picked up. RobertWalker 19:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thats sorta possible, if say, we added a category to the template then had it use that category and trace the link to the bots page and look for its jar. However thats a lot of extra skipping around, and its a realy strain on server resources to have to 'check' for these things. --Chase-san 20:07, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

A couple issues with that, though not show-stopping issues: one, we have bots in the rumble with no bot pages. (Vanessa, for instance.) Two, you don't always have your latest version in the rumble, or you have to post a temporary RRGC version or something like that. With all the little caveats, the Participants page might still be the most elegant solution. --Voidious 20:13, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Is there a reason this list isn't being used for the rumble yet? Also, is there an updated zip of the rumble bots around? (Or could someone make it? :-D? I'd like to start running battles again. -- Alcatraz 12:52, 8 December 2008 (EST)

robowiki.net is running again, but maybe is time to activate this participant list? --lestofante 13:40, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Agree. Many down of the old wiki can make newbie like me try many new idea on rumble! --Nat 11:44, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Anyone still interesting with this issue? This can accomplish via a bot. If we have property name rumbleLocation in infobox, and the template automatically put any robot with that parameter into some category, I can make my soon-created bot handler that, say once per hour? For special RRGC/WSGC or a bot without page, there can still use another participant list and it will be merged to another page when the bot run. » Nat | Talk » 09:35, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Personally anyway, it seems that trying to make entry via infobox just overcomplicates things really. I'd much perfer there just be one simple way to do it: Add it to the participants page by hand. --Rednaxela 14:33, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree. The only change that I'd like to see (eventually) is to have the server maintain the participants list and bot storage. But I'm not ready to commit to programming that yet. --Darkcanuck 17:25, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I would personally like to see it done via roborumble.org (which has sorta dropped). — Chase-san 03:09, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

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Tigger

Hey man, you don't need to remove Tigger, one of us would gladly host it. Darkcanuck has posted most rumble bots to his server already, so you can make it point here if you want: http://darkcanuck.net/rumble/robots/stefw.Tigger_0.0.23.jar. Of course it's your call, but it seems a shame to remove such an old-school bot. --Voidious 14:01, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• I wouldn't just call it an old-school bot, but also a very interesting one that gives a fair number of surfers some trouble if I remember right.. :) --Rednaxela 14:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• Because its unique and only Tile Coding? » Nat | Talk » 15:01, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• Well, it trounces Komarious, gives PulsarMax, Lukious, Engineer, and WinterMute a rather hard time... not sure if that's because of it's unique Tile Coding things, but it might well be --Rednaxela 15:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• It could be its unique stats system. Since it's a reference bot for the TC2K6, the Targeting Challenge 2K6/Results give us at least some insight into its movement. Clearly, some top bots can really zero in on Tigger, but a lot of still very strong guns have some trouble with it. And the low scores against Linear Targeting and Circular Targeting seem odd, but might mean that he always enables a flattener, or just has some anomaly or bug that has a similar effect. --Voidious 15:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• Well, it's reference scores against linear/circular targeting don't look that weird to me. I mean, the only reference bots that do better against the simple targeting are either surfers or the tremendously well-tuned multi-mode known as GrubbmGrb --Rednaxela 16:51, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

• Tigger is a surfer, though. :-P And his score against HoT is respectable. --Voidious 17:17, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hey guys, should we re-enter Tigger? StefW's only reason given was about Geocities going down, so I say we do it. Any objections? --Voidious 02:04, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Agree. And the Geocities isn't going down till October, I can still access my webpage right now. But we can have the Darkcanucks' one. I think we usually grab it from the zip files, btw. » Nat | Talk » 13:17, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Re-enter it. It is a decent and quite unique bot and also away to honour StefW for his development of the initial onPaint. --GrubbmGait 22:03, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Broken Links!

I just fixed a ton of them! Also, thanks to Darkcanuck for the http://darkcanuck.net/rumble/robots/ hosting of them. Now.. I hope we can keep them more fixed than they have been, as that was rather tedious :P --Rednaxela 00:25, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

TheBrainPi fix

I just added the fix version of TheBrainPi, I did some testing and it didn't seem to throw any exceptions. I uploaded it to my google site because roborepository would upload it as mine, and show Zyx as author and that didn't seem right, but I don't know if it is better if Darkcanuck can host it in his sever? All I changed in the code has a comment that contains the words Unofficial fix very close from which it can be easy to see the changes. --zyx 01:21, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Very cool of you to take care of that! Check out the comparison: [1]. It's little things like this that make me appreciate what a great community we have here. --Voidious 16:28, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks just a very small retribution to Albert's immense contributions. And you are right, this is a great community, I wish I had more time to help more. --zyx 17:41, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Ok, the fixed version is now on my server (along with all other current 1v1 and melee bots) so you can change the link if you like. Thanks for doing this! --Darkcanuck 19:51, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Removing duplicates

Wow, there are a lot more duplicates in the participants list than I realized. Any objections to me removing all but the highest ranking version of each of these bots?

altglass.Exterminans2oo8 alpha0328,http://d-gfx.kognetwork.ch/robocode/altglass.Exterminans2oo8_alpha0328.jar
altglass.Exterminans2oo8 Build0411,http://d-gfx.kognetwork.ch/robocode/altglass.Exterminans2oo8_Build0411.jar
am.Miedzix 2.0,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3383/am.Miedzix_2.0.jar
am.Miedzix 3.0,http://darkcanuck.net/rumble/robots/am.Miedzix_3.0.jar
cjk.Merkava 0.1.1,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/2637/cjk.Merkava_0.1.1.jar
cjk.Merkava 0.2.0,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/2640/cjk.Merkava_0.2.0.jar
cjk.Merkava 0.3.0,http://darkcanuck.net/rumble/robots/cjk.Merkava_0.3.0.jar
kurios.DOSexe .9a,http://www.kuriosly.com/roborumble/kurios.DOSexe_.9a.jar
kurios.DOSexe .9b,http://www.kuriosly.com/roborumble/kurios.DOSexe_.9b.jar
pak.Dargon 1.0b,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3388/pak.Dargon_1.0b.jar
pak.Dargon .2c,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3389/pak.Dargon_.2c.jar
paulk.PaulV3 1.7,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3502/paulk.PaulV3_1.7.jar
paulk.PaulV3 1.6,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3497/paulk.PaulV3_1.6.jar
paulk.PaulV3 1.5,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3496/paulk.PaulV3_1.5.jar
paulk.PaulV3 1.3,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3495/paulk.PaulV3_1.3.jar
zyx.micro.Ant 1.1,http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotFiles/3481/zyx.micro.Ant_1.1.jar
zyx.micro.Ant 2.1,http://sites.google.com/site/zyxsite/robocode/zyx.micro.Ant_2.1.jar

Also planning to remove "whind.StrengthBee 0.6.4", as that was just a test of Strength with CassiusClay/Bee gun. And is this "rule" actually written anywhere? (I know it's kind of a "soft rule", but I still think it's a good one, in general.)

--Voidious 22:39, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there is this rule written anywhere. But I think we should add the second rule to the RoboWiki: "Common sense is the rule" =) --Nat Pavasant 04:38, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree with that, it is common sense. About micro.Ant, I didn't know there were two versions of it (in life not only in the rumble). I'm removing v2.1 but I think that maybe they only share the name, there is a good chance they have no code in common, it's been quite a while since I wrote that. --zyx

Common sense indeed. The number of participants has gone from 300 when I started to nearly 750 now, so duplicates and testbots should be removed, preferrable by the author. Authors should even consider if older bots with successors and without 'unique' setup could be removed. (Says the man with 8 1v1 and 6 meleebots.) But the latter is strictly a matter for the author and not for the community. --GrubbmGait 09:51, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes that's a good idea. How about also removing bots that reguarly freeze/skip many turns/take lots of memory and/or have to be stopped by robocode? --Positive 11:05, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Cool - I'll give this another couple days before removing any of the dups myself. zyx, that's funny =), and if they are indeed different bots, of course feel free to leave them both in. GrubbmGait, well said, I completely agree. Positive, I personally agree about bots that crash frequently (DogManSPE and SmallDevil come to mind), but IIRC, I suggested removing DogManSPE once before and met with some resistance. =) --Voidious 17:02, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I completely agree as well, I will probably be removing a number of out dated or test robots of mine (such as prototype, sou, orbit, and problembot). Also duplicates and robots that crash often or have to be stopped by robocode, or that use problematic methods (such as the static reference of Advanced/Team robot). These should be removed, unless they can be repaired, or if some reason exists for retaining them. For example gg.Wolverine I repaired a long time ago to keep it from losing battles due to calls to getXX. But it wasn't a simple fix. — Chase-san 14:56, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Removal of crashing bots

Ugh... I was about to post here proposing the removal of DogManSPE due to the great deal of instability it has and then I read in the previous section that there was some resistance to such removal in the past. Personally... I'm finding this one to be highly irritating because it always shows up as a high score diff when comparing bot versions, and often a big enough difference to have a non-negligible impact on overall score. --Rednaxela 03:59, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Looking on the old wiki for references to DogManSPE, the only mentions I see are countless complaints and comments about it being a high PBI bot for them (due to it happening to not crash against them), and some mention on oldwiki:RoboRumble/RankingChat20070224 which isn't really resistance to DogManSPE specifically I think, particularly considering how it doesn't look like it was entered by it's author in the first place. --Rednaxela 04:12, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

As you may have seen in those discussions, I'm also in favor of removing DogManSPE for that reason. But I've lived with it this long... =) So whatever. --Voidious 04:33, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I have no sympathy for DogManSPE. That said, if there were enough battles then this crashing effect would be smoothed out. There are other crashing bots stuck at the bottom of the rumble, presumably abandoned by their authors (eg. ElverionBot, Dreadknoght)... --Darkcanuck 04:51, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Update of RoboRumble Version

What I don't get is why RoboRumble uses Robocode version 1.6.1.4 (I think, it might be slightly newer). Right now we are on release 1.7.2.1 Beta. The least we could do is use 1.7.2.0... --PiRocks

Because the 1.7.2 line is still not stable enough. True, there is a lot of changes, but from 1.6.1.4 to 1.6.2, 1.6.2 to 1.7 and 1.7 to 1.7.1 has a lot of very big changes, which is inevitable for bugs to occur. There were at least three discussions of this, but I can't remember where they are. --Nat Pavasant 12:45, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Actually, unless you know bugs that you haven't reported, 1.7.2.0 and 1.7.2.1 Beta may be stable enough (Unless PiRock's 'workaround' truly shows a security bug in the current version). I haven't had a good enough chance to fully test either, but I was very heavily testing just before 1.7.2.0 release and I'm pretty sure 1.7.2.0/1.7.2.1 will be stable enough. Just need to test it properly. --Rednaxela 13:04, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, my workaround most definately shows a security error. 1.7.2.1 Beta doesn't protect the main ThreadGroup, so my robot accesses it and waits for enemy robots to be scanned. Then once scanned, it calls interrupt() on their Thread and they get destroyed due to inactivity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by PiRocks (talk • contribs)

Heh... I've created a bug report for this now. Also, removed the bot from the rumble, because 1) Generally not good to have exploit bots there and, 2) As you noted it's broken anyway in 1.6.1.4. Thanks for uncovering the issue. --Rednaxela 00:22, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Removal of old bots.

I didn't want to be the one to suggest this. I dislike hanging myself in public. But I do think it is a good idea. There are so many now, that the rankings have many very old very poorly performing robots. We already want to remove robots which time out due to getXXXX calls, or which just don't work anymore. But consider back in 2004 or so and we only had around 350 robots in the rumble, that number has doubled and then some.

I am all for the history, but the number of old, poorly performing, buggy or just out of date robots is staggering. With almost 800 participants the number of battles needed to stabilize its ranking is rather high. All I am suggesting is a one time trim, pick a target number and carefully select the robots in which we can live with (an no one complains about) dropping. I say at the very least 400.

(I don't expect many people to like this idea, however much I do)

— Chase-san 03:22, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Only time for one quick comment before bed, but... Reducing the number of bots would not decrease the number of battles required to get a stable ranking. Only removing the bots with the highest variance would do that. (Assuming you've faced everyone at least once.) Even if you are just facing one bot, it would take 1500-2000 battles to get a result as accurate as we want in the rumble. At least, I'm pretty sure that's the case. Hopefully some resident math wiz can back me up. =) --Voidious 04:35, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't have time right this moment to comment on any other aspects, but I'll quickly comment on the impact of number of bots on rank stability. First off, you're most definitely correct asymptotically Voidious, in that number of participants wouldn't impact stability as the number of battles becomes very large. When the number of battles is not very large though, I can think of two effects which cause a deviation:

1. The obvious one, is that before pairings are complete, the accuracy/stability of the rank is reduced due a high chance of scores against many bots not being what's expected (i.e. problembts). 500 battles with 300 participants will be more stable than 500 battles with 800 participants, due to this.
2. When pairings are complete, battles are not distributed randomly, and not necessarily evenly. Because each pairing is weighted equally, each additional battle added has more impact on score stability when added to a pairing with few battles so far. What this means is, say you have Robot A, which has results against Robots X, Y, and Z. If the pairings A vs X, A vs Y, and A vs Z each have 2 battles, the resulting score is more stable than if A vs X has 1, A vs Y has 3, and A vs Z has 2.

I'm not sure if factor #2 has that big an affect really, but it's a non-zero effect. #1 is definitely a noticeably effect I'd say, though only temporary. --Rednaxela 13:16, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

As for #2, I don't really think that matters. I agree that 1/3/2 is less stable than 2/2/2, but 2/6/4 should be the same stability as 1/1/3/3/2/2, I think. So I don't think it really pertains to number of bots. --Voidious 14:53, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, I imagine my opinion is pretty predictable =), but I vote not to remove old bots. Personally, I like the ridiculous diversity we have in the rumble. I like when some bot I've never heard of exposes some obscure flaw in my own bot. I like the idea of old Robocoders coming back 5 years later, checking the rumble and finding their bots still competing. And while we may have twice as many bots as 2005, our computers are 5x faster (or more) anyway.

I also don't really see the value in removing them and I just don't see a fair way to choose which bots to remove. Being old or having a low ranking doesn't seem like good criteria to me. "Buggy" is tough to gauge, and we've already removed or fixed the buggiest rumble bots (with inactive authors). If enough people are in favor, maybe we can vote. But this is not a decision to be taken lightly, so if it does come to that, I think we should give it lots of lead time (like months) to discuss and vote on it.

--Voidious 14:53, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I honestly do agree with you in the most part. However I still feel like there are just to many. I would must rather everyone take a gauge of their robots and remove all but they want rankings for in the rumble. But considering many authors are no longer around, that isn't an entirely feasible option. — Chase-san 19:19, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

How about this, instead of choosing which robots to remove, we choose which robots to keep, which is a much less stressful and guilty endeavor. But limit it to a few dozen robots per person to add back in (nothing exact), just so no one just copies the entire list and says 'all of them'. Of course we could end up having the entire list back given enough people. — Chase-san 19:27, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I am in support of removing any nonworking robots (the ones that time out from getXXX or any other errors) but I think that the other older robots that still function should be kept. --Exauge ◊ talk 23:08, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree. I know that I would be a bit peeved if I came back to Robocode a few years later only to find that my bot and all the bots I had known had been removed because they were considered weak and old. On the other hand, if it *specifically* was slowing down the rumble due to crashing, timing out etc. then I wouldn't mind as much. --Skilgannon 19:03, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Instead of removing the robots from the lists, they could be moved to another page (old participants list). This way they are not completely gone, and we would have a kind of "history" of robots that previously took part in the rumble. Just a suggestion. --Fnl 20:42, 11 August 2010 (UTC)