Portia

Portia
Author(s)	Positive
Extends	AdvancedRobot
Targeting	Semi-Linear, GuessFactor
Movement	Minimum Risk, Stop And Go, Random
Released	July 2009
Current Version	1.00
Code License	closed
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Background Information

What's special about it?

Portia is my first robot, and I'm very proud of it. :)

How competitive is it?

In melee it's quite competitive. :) In solo it's not.

Melee strategy

How does it move?

For each opponent, if Portia detects an enemy energy drop, linear and/or headon shots are simulated from the guessed enemy fire turn and position. Portia tries to avoid simulated shots, and also tries to never be the closest opponent to any enemy. Portia remembers the enemy energy drops, and correlates hits to itself to them.

How does it fire?

It mostly uses semi-linear targetting. The difference with normal linear targetting is that Portia assumes that if an opponent accelerates, it will keep doing so until it reaches max velocity. The results vary, and currently it performs very poor against some bots using Oscillator Movement.

How does it select a target to attack/avoid in melee?

It mainly selects the closest opponent, but it tries not to switch targets too much. If it's near a corner it highly prefers opponents near the same corner.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Between rounds, it saves general linear-targeting info. If an opponent only seems to be shooting with Head-On Targeting like HawkOnFire, it remembers that between matches.

One-on-one strategy

How does it move in One-on-one?

Until the end game, it first tries to use Stop And Go-like movement, and if the opponent seems to catch on it switches to Random Movement. At the end game, it will try to get very close to the opponent to give the final blow. :)

How does it fire?

It uses an ultra-fast decaying GF gun. If the current GF-bin doesn't have a lot of data, or has high entropy (not many recorded firing angles in the same range), it uses the most recent GF angles instead.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Between rounds it saves targeting info if the match started with only one opponent. Otherwise it saves nothing. It saves nothing between matches.

Additional Information

Where did you get the name?

"Portia" is the name of a spider I'm somewhat fascinated with. The spider is extremely intelligent (considering its size & that it's a spider): it can hunt using a plethora of methods, and attacks and defends itself strategically. I thought that name was a great fit. :) You can read more about the spider on Wikipedia.

Can I use your code?

At the moment I'm keeping it closed source. Turn on paint to get an idea what it's thinking though. :)

What's next for your robot?

• Better melee targeting. I've been thinking about this a lot, but I can't figure out a logical way to improve this yet. Opponent's melee behaviour is dependent on so many things: their last position, position and energy(changes) of opponents around them, their position relative to the wall and the corner, etc. Also, your image is much more incomplete than in 1v1 because of incomplete scans.
• Better guessing of who's firing at Portia in melee.
• Fix collision problem (it doesn't invalidate plots through opponents, so when it collides it sometimes stays "locked" to his opponent)
• Improve 1v1 mode, targetting & movement.
• I'd like to speed the melee mode up more somehow.
• Anything interesting I hear or find out about. :)

Does it have any White Whales?

At the moment, I hope to make it consistently defeat GlowBlowMelee and Infinity in melee. And, of course, all the top-10. :P

What's it based on

I've written all the code myself. But I would like to give some credits.

• The Stop And Go was inspired by Coriantumr by Kawigi.
• The solo gun has really benefited from his GuessFactor Targeting Tutorial as well.
• The melee dodging is much easier to test thanks to the debugging graphics of Gladiator by KID.
• I've found Diamond by Voidious also very useful to test the solo targeting with because of its graphics. :)