Welcome

Thanks for the welcome guys. It's great to know there's still a active community years after the game was introduced!

Voidious, I guess it's a privillage knowing other robocoders, hadn't thought about that. Have you considered trying to organise a competition in your city? A group like the local Linux Users Group, or ACM might be interested. I've consider running something like that after this comp is over. I have a feeling I might be hooked on robocode for a while.

Happy to talk more about our competition, let me know if you have any questions.

Here's the latest rankings...

11/06/2012 12:27											
Results for 500 rounds											
Rank	Robot Name	    Total Score    	Survival	Surv Bonus	Bullet Dmg	Bullet Bonus	Ram Dmg * 2	Ram Bonus	 1sts 	 2nds 	 3rds 
1st	MarksRobots.Mbotv1*	407104 (12%)	279100	19880	99602	7967	462	93	142	81	75
2nd	apc.BadWolf*	380278 (11%)	256350	18060	95338	8854	1619	57	129	61	59
3rd	apc.LeeroyJenkins2*	373103 (11%)	265800	16660	82728	6402	1505	9	119	121	58
4th	apc.FaceOfBoe 1.0*	283546 (8%)	217900	5320	55499	2345	2318	164	38	58	65
5th	apc.Colossus2 0.13	258344 (7%)	196950	5460	50655	3553	1682	45	39	24	59
6th	apc.ShellyBot*	231230 (7%)	136400	700	76411	6193	10590	935	5	8	7
7th	Tim.Maximillian 1.0	218011 (6%)	152950	560	58376	3448	2632	45	4	11	23
8th	wally.walnut*	200190 (6%)	164850	980	32508	1021	821	10	7	31	34
9th	apc.Walls*	197329 (6%)	162850	420	32364	890	796	10	3	30	42
10th	apc.JarrodDoomedRobot*	167150 (5%)	149300	1400	15339	514	596	0	10	21	25
11th	apc.stratman*	167081 (5%)	133450	0	31216	1015	1393	7	0	6	9
12th	apc.Squirrel*	164965 (5%)	134050	0	29142	341	1421	12	0	6	6
13th	apc.Legin*	156496 (4%)	142250	0	12810	82	1343	11	0	8	11
14th	arp.Gimp 1.0*	152729 (4%)	134200	280	17114	314	797	25	2	27	20
15th	apc.bot42*	136208 (4%)	96650	280	37767	871	640	1	2	8	6

I think part of walls success is due to being out of radar range at times, but mostly because he stays out of the fray in the middle of the field. A number of robots have run into issues with their enemy being out of radar range. If your movement code never looks to seek our your opponent he could hide outside of radar range, no one appears to have tried that strategy yet. I noticed when testing my robot last night with Genesis and Diamond, Diamond shot all it's energy into a wall while Genesis sat outside of radar range doing nothing. Naturally I my robot was dead at that stage...

If you look at bot42, you'll notice it has unexpectedly high bullet damage for its survival. It's using a neural network to determine the best targeting strategy to use. He's implemented linear, circular, and pattern matching I believe. If he can improve his movement, I'd expect him to jump up the ranks.

Legin and Squirrel and largely unmodified Sample.Crazy. Wallnut and Gimp are modified Sample.Walls.

Since you are all so helpful, a couple of questions... 1. Has any one attempted to develop a targeting system based on a regression line of previous movements? It is an idea I'm considering... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_regression 2. Is there a place I can get an explaination of all the numbers in the darkcanuck roborumble tables? I haven't been able to find it on the wiki and I'm not familar with some of the numbers (such as Glicko-2 etc)