Rumble questions and issues ...

Hi mates

I try to bring my robocode environment back to work and would have some questions and maybe some issues.

Are there some changes in the rumble client for 1.8.1.0, I should know about? Beside the increased upload speed, I mean? Because melee battles are not canceled if one/more bots couldn't loaded. Shame on me - I'm still on java 1.6 and a couple of bots are 1.7 written. I try to exclude all 1.7 bots right now but not sure if I get them all. In 1vs1 I get an 'could not load' error for 'apv.TheBrainPi_0.5fix.jar' which looks perfectly fine, link and package wise, so far :(.

Something different: I have to admit that I do not understand how to use the new scoring columns. I know what they do (maybe not fully), but don't get how to interpret the values. For example NPP. If I have, lets say, 88% against an particular bot - where do I have to look and what should I do to increase this number (or better what is wrong and then find a way to make it better)? Is there a way to spot bugs/uncertainties from the scoring columns? I remember looking at the battle table against each robot quite often to see if I loose one or more rounds here and there which brought me to a couple of bugs/mistakes I made.

I'm not sure what's up with the 1.8.1.0 issues, what version of the JVM are you using? OpenJDK or Oracle?

As for the scoring columns, I added a link on the Literumble homepage which explains how the scores are calculated. NPP is your APS score normalised against the min and max score against this bot, so if you got 88% then you are close the the maximum score achieved, 0 would mean you got the lowest score and 100 the highest score. So somebody gets 0 NPP and somebody gets 100 NPP against every bot.

When looking for bugs I normally look at the lowest KNNPBI score, or compare to previous versions to see the biggest drop in score. However, in melee this is harder because the score in each battle obviously also depends on who else was in the battle at the time. I'm thinking of adding a 'variance' column, which should help point to bots which cause bugs to happen only some of the time, but I'm very busy right now so if I do that it will only be in late August (I'm in the final writing stage for my MSc!)

Yes I saw the score description page and it tells very good where the numbers come from - but unfortunately (for me) not enough how to interpret or use it. I think I have to get used to it with a little more observations how the numbers change. My guess for the NPP was, if I get 88% there are bots who perform better then I (score wise) against this bot. But how can I find the bots that are better than me? KNNPBI is great to spot the bots that I have trouble in general with but I don't see how I could use the numbers to see that I loose lets say 1-2 rounds (rounds not battles) every now and then which normally tells me that I have a bug for very specific situations (trapped in the corner at round start for example). Is the K value calculated for general or for every class new? Yes you are right in melee you get a wider spread in score for each bot because you can't tell what other bots are on the field and it would be nice to see the range or something.

But by all means take your time and concentrate on your MSc - good luck with it! I donated a little bit to help you with the maintenance costs and hope you can use it.

Take care

Edit: argh - forget about the NPP question I found it right after I wrote this. I just have to look at the bots score table and see who is better than me. Well I feel a little stupid right now :)

Thank you for the donation =) Each rumble is completely independent, only the client knows that minirumble is related to nanorumble, microrumble and roborumble more than say, gigarumble. So the K value is dependant on the rumble that the scores are from, for example if you are looking at Yatagan scores in the nanorumble then K will be calculated from the nanorumble size, if you look at the Yatagan scores in the roborumble K will be larger.

I'm not sure how to do exactly what you are asking without storing every single pairing, which gets far too complicated (and expensive) with the design I have now. Checking the Survival will tell you how many battles you win/lose, but again that is only an average. I am thinking of keeping a Variance score for both APS and Survival (this will be easy to calculate incrementally just like I do the APS for a pairing), and from the variance I can also calculate Standard Deviation and Confidence Interval as I render the page.

About the NPP question, yes you have it, it is a problem that requires the entire score matrix to answer, so you need to check the scores on the other bot's page =)

Thanks for the good wishes for the MSc. Right now it just feels like lots of hard, boring work!

Are you sure it's a change of behavior about the Java 7 bots? I would expect the battle to still run and those bots to get zero scores. I've removed some bots from the participants list for requiring Java 7 and asked people to update with Java 6 compatibility - we shouldn't be requiring Java 7 yet. A more prominent notice about that somewhere might be nice. (Excluding them is also fine of course.)

I remember TheBrainPi could get into a broken state with his save data. I think that's part of what we "fixed" but maybe it's still possible? Could you delete him from the .data dir, or was this on a fresh install already?

I'm not sure if it is a change, but I remember I had this before and the missing bots where just replaced with another bot from the list. Hmm not sure if all bots get zero score. I just saw the battle starts and takes his time to finish and the upload starts like normal (I will check this). And you get a message on battle start 'bot ... could not loaded'. There are quite a lot bots written with java 7 so my guess was it is standard now.

Yes it's a new install from the scratch with all bots loaded (empty robots directory). I had to fix some broken links in the participants files. So - yep fresh install.

I'm on Oracle 1.6 for all my systems.