Hyperion

Background Information

What's special about it?: Hyperion is my first try to design a really competitive robot. It's a MegaBot designed for one-on-one using Virtual Guns and a rather simple movement.

This robot was the base for Ascendant, a 2-year RoboRumble champion.

How competitive is it?: Even though it has been 12 years since its last update, Hyperion ranks in the top 100 in general 1v1.

How does it move?

It randomly picks a position on the battlefield that:

Has roughly the same distance to the opponent as the current position.
Will not require the bot to pass its opponent to reach it (meaning it is on the same side of the opponent as the current position).

Then it moves towards that position. After a random number of ticks, a new position is selected.

How does it fire?: It uses a virtual gun array, containing a well-tuned GuessFactor gun and a very fast learning gun.

How does it dodge bullets?: There is a chance that a new position is selected, when a bullet is detected.

How does the melee strategy differ from One-on-one strategy?: It's a one-on-one bot. Never tested melee, so its probably throwing exceptions at that

What does it save between rounds and matches?: It saves nothing between battles. Between rounds, targeting information is stored.

Where did you get the name?: It was the first that came to my mind and was not in use already. Might have something to do with the astronomy book I read back then (Hyperion is a moon of Saturn).

Can I use your code?: Not at the moment. I will eventually release the source code (though some cleaning up might be required first).

What's next for your robot?: Maybe re-tuning the movement (though I won't switch it to Wave Surfing).

What other robot(s) is it based on?: It's not based on other robots/code in particular. I used some ideas from the wiki, the most important probably being Virtual Guns, GuessFactor Targeting, and how to implement Pattern Matching.

Version 0.8 (March 20, 2005) – rating: 1903
- Basically a release of the development version of Hyperion, with a lot of code changes made during the development of Ascendant.
- Updated targeting, uses the same as Ascendant (again).
Version 0.7.3 (May 25, 2004) – rating: 1831 (dropped to 1810)
- Included wall segmentation in GuessFactor Targeting.
- Removed Head-On Targeting (in theory there should be always another gun that's better against a specific opponent).
- Really minor movement change.
- Tuned the firepower selection a bit (not sure if the new one is better though).
Version 0.7.2 (May 22, 2004) – rating: 1793
- Reworked Pattern Matching (no fixed pattern length any more).
- Removed Circular Targeting (was never the best gun vs. any bot in my testbed).
- Added averaging Linear Targeting.
- Minor change to movement, will sometimes react to bullet fire now.
Version 0.7.1 (May 12, 2004) – rating: 1771
- Changed movement a bit to deal with some of its lower ranked problem bots.
- Improved gun management (made targeting faster).
- Increased accuracy of GuessFactor Targeting.
Version 0.7 (May 07, 2004) – rating: 1726
- Initial release.