Talk:Darkcanuck/RRServer

Fire away...

Just a suggestion for an additional check. I have never seen score a bot more than 8000 points, so this could be checked too. When examining the results that messed up the original roborumble rating beyond repair, I saw results of 20000 against 16000 (Thats what you get when running OneOnOne with MELEE=YES). For the time being I let my client running (unattended) for ABC's server, as I don't really have the time for bughunting. Your effort however seems promising. Good luck. -- GrubbmGait

• Thanks! That's a good check, will be combining that with the survival >=35 (also your suggestion I think) once I rearrange the error handling and failure output to the client. Then I'll look into ELO... --Darkcanuck
• Your checks have both been implemented. -- Darkcanuck

Looking very nice! I have a couple questions and thoughts I thought I'll mention. So what is this "Ideal" column in the results mean? One thought I had about ratings, is perhaps it would be best to make the APS fill missing pairings with Glicko-based estimates? I'm thinking that would give the best long term stability/accuracy once pairings are complete while having something a more meaningful before pairings are complete before the pairings are complete. --Rednaxela 01:18, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! I've just posted a bit more about ratings here. The "Ideal" column is my attempt to reverse calculate a rating based on a bot's APS. I just inverted the Glicko formula for "E" (expected probability) to yield a rating given if given E (i.e. APS) and a competitor's rating and RD. For the latter two I used the defaults (1500 and 350) so theoretically if the APS represents the score vs an average bot (and there's a uniform distribution?) then the rating might converge to the "ideal" value. But I have no idea if it works, just wanted to see how close it might be. I'm not sure you could fill in the pairings using Glicko + APS -- the reason systems like Glicko exist is to get around the problem of incomplete pairings, so the Glicko rating should be enough in itself. If it's accurate, that is -- we'll see once the ratings catch up to the pairings already submitted... -- Darkcanuck 03:39, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, I see. Thanks for the explanation. If the Glicko rating doesn't converge very very close to the "Ideal" then I'd say it alone might not be the best fit alone for Robocode due to how complete pairings are not hard to get. The reason I suggest using APS and filling missing pairings with Glicko-based percent estimates, is because my proposed method will be guaranteed to always converge to an exact APS ranking order when pairings are complete, and would quite surely be at least slightly better than APS when pairings are not complete. Perhaps I'm more picky than most, but I'd consider a hybrid necessary if "Glicko" doesn't in practice converge to "Ideal" to within an accuracy that preserves exact rankings with APS (which I think is very plain and simple the most fair when there are complete pairings). I suppose we'll see how accurately Glicko converges :) --Rednaxela 04:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Be careful about the "ideal" convergence concept! Keep in mind that I made this value up and it doesn't really have a statistical basis of any sort. I was just curious what a naive reversal with a single data point might produce, in order to get an idea of what neighbourhood DrussGT's rating might be in, for example. I also wanted to get a sense whether I had programmed the formulas correctly. I wonder though, if we're abusing these rating systems by using %score instead of absolute win/lose values (1/0)? Would the Glicko rating converge more rapidly to match the APS scale if I had chosen win/loss? I'm very curious, but no so much as to interrupt the current rebuild, which may take longer than I thought. -- Darkcanuck 04:54, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, I'm not talking about the convergence to that "Ideal" column. I'm talking about convergence of the relative rankings as opposed to specific rating numbers. If the rankings, don't converge to exactly the same order as APS, then I think there's issue enough to justify a hybrid that uses APS, with ELO or Glicko to estimate missing pairings. --Rednaxela 05:10, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Gotcha. I suppose you could keep track of the rating (Elo or Glicko) and just use it to calculate expected scores for missing pairings. Then generate an estimated APS for full pairings. We'll have to see how well the ratings stabilize. I'm thinking I should have used Glicko-2 instead, since it includes a volatility rating to account for erratic (read problem bot) performance. -- Darkcanuck 06:22, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Started sending the results to your server, as long as you relay them to ABC's server. What is the delay btw? --GrubbmGait 10:08, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for joining in! I have no plans to stop relaying results and have been doing so for almost a week now. If by "delay" you mean occasional slow connections, it's due to the scoring update and I've posted it on the known issues page. I have this process cranked up at the moment while I try to get the ratings to catch up, but it will get faster soon. :) -- Darkcanuck 15:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Great job with his server, you can always get the ranking/battles_* files from my server and sumbit them all into yours. I'm also experimenting with mySql atm. My SQL skills are a little rusty but it's all coming back pretty fast :).

I also have a few doubts about the new ranting method. The first one is: why? From what I understand Glicko is an ELO extension for rankings where the match frequency is not uniform between participants, which is not the rumble's case? As an experiment it's very cool, but for me the "old" ELO method is time tested and proven to work great, and should be the default sorting method for the ranking table. --ABC 11:23, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I also have some doubts about if Glicko will actually give better or much different results than ELO, however I'm not sure ELO is really the best default ranking system when full pairings are easiest to get. I suppose we'll see once your server gets to full pairings, but I'm strongly suspecting there will be some ranking deviations from the APS ranking, which I think is hard to argue is in any way biased. --Rednaxela 13:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I have doubts as well, but I wouldn't have known until I tried it. My major objection against Elo is the lack of a clear, published implementation. It was easier to implement Glicko than to sort through the RR server code. If someone can clarify this for me, sure I'll try it out. Why not? -- Darkcanuck 15:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Bravo

I just want to leave a note saying you're awesome. :) It's really nice having someone put effort into improving the rumble itself. Good work! --Simonton 03:27, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and FNL, if you're reading this, that goes double for you :). --Simonton 03:30, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Style

Do you think you or I could restyle the page, some basic css could go a long way to making the page look more modern and less of an eyesore. An example of my work is here, though it wouldn't look like my page there but it will be clean (and it will validate). Currently its not even setup as a webpage. Which means it will render in quarks mode by all browsers, which is a very slow and cpu intensive rendering mode.

In fact there is alot you can do to both reduce html elements and increase rendering speed. Such as changing the <td><b> combo into just <th> tags, because thats what they are for <td> = table data, <th> = table header, with some css you can justify thier alignment, it wouldn't require much css, as such alot of css is actually undesirable in a simple page such as this, but css is perferred over tags because it is actually faster in most cases (very old or poorly designed browsers being the exception).

Chase-san 08:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

• I very strongly agree! It's on the roadmap, but I've focused on the data side first. The current "pages" were based on a view-source from the old server. A little css and valid xhtml would go a long way. I also want to switch to a template system (maybe Smarty or Zend?) for easier reading and better reuse -- having html mixed in with php makes for some very ugly code. If you want to style some static content and send it to me, that would be great! --Darkcanuck 15:04, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

xhtml is very nice, while most browsers support true xhtml (except IE and Konqueror), the ones that do not, control a large enough majority where it would have to be described as text/html anyway. This mitigates the real purpose of an xhtml page but is nice to have the framework in place for when they catch up (all the work that would have to be done is switching the content type). I think using Smarty or Zend is overkill unless you plan on extending the system further and I only suggest them only if you plan on doing something like roborumble.org. They are template engines, meaning you would have to make templates for them, which jsut adds alot of extra overhead on something simple like this. Remember KIS, keep it simple. --Chase-san 21:36, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

If you really want a really nice super-quick super-simple "template engine" I suggest you consider this. Instead of bothering with special "template" languages, you write your templates just in PHP, and all the "template engine" does is set up variables making really clean shorthand like <?=$title;?> all that's needed to put some variable in the template. I once tried it when hacking around and found it to be a really nice KIS approach to "template engines". Also the author put the code there in public domain, so there are no issues using it in here as we see fit. --Rednaxela 03:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I at one point designed my own KIS template system, it was simular to others except that the content to replace was in {}, for example {title} and then for other parts I did things like <table>{row_start}<tr><td>{row_num}</td><td>{row_data}</td></tr>{row_end}</table>. All this was kept in a seperate file and required parsing, but otherwise was fairly simple that it was a template engine but also it only used half a dozen commands and you used the functions to fill in the data. I will see if I can locate it or remake it if you like the sound of using a template but still want to keep it very simple. --Chase-san 22:41, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions guys, but I'm sticking to my original plan (Smarty). If the template engine ever becomes the bottleneck, then I'll look into something custom. --Darkcanuck 02:13, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay, cool. I would like to work on a template for the actual score page then, I am great at css and making it cross-compatible with other browsers (namely IE, Firefox, and Safari (I use Opera, so obviously it will work for that too)). Unlike making robots, web pages are not very time consuming. Do you have any kind of messenger we could talk (I have or can get any of them) --Chase-san 04:08, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Excellent! Don't use messenging much, and I'm currently travelling at the moment so email is better: jerome-at-darkcanuck-net --Darkcanuck 23:43, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Team Rankings

Is it an idea to get the battles for teams from Pulsars server? I think they have no weird results, and your ranking will at least have a teamranking then. --GrubbmGait 17:57, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Good idea! I'll grab the battle file, but need to figure out how to exclude older team versions to keep the server load down. --Darkcanuck 01:58, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Table Sorting

Very nice things things lately! I do have a couple little gripes though. One thing, is I think it would be more natural if first click does 'highest-first' unlike how TableSorter seems to operate by default. Secondly... ugh... it's so damn slow to sort. Even on my fairly modern system there's a very ugly delay when sorting the table (a 20 year old machine could sort the data faster with static code probably... not everyone uses Google Chrome or an experimental FF build) and I imagine this would become a very annoying delay on anything older. Not only is the JS sorting slower than server-side but there's no indication of it processing/loading which irks me a little. Perhaps if the JS sorting is stuck there should be a little line or two of code to make a 'loading...' indicator of some sort? In any case, great work lately! --Rednaxela 21:39, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem with javascript when sorting big tables is not the sorting in itself but the big number of DOM document changes when you generate the resulting table HTML. I'm currently developing a small javascript application at work that sorts a table of around 500 entries pretty much instantaneously. It only shows the top 5 entries as a table (similar to DC targeting, curiously :)), if I generate the 500 rows it becomes very slow. --ABC 23:14, 26 October 2008 (UTC)