Robocode Online Web Application - what do You think?
Haha, ok, I stand corrected. :-P
Btw, don't take any of this as me disagreeing with you on a fundamental level or anything. But my Little Man kinda hears it as building a Robocode framework to plug all the holes in Robocode's game design so you can focus on the tiny slice of the game that you actually like. It just feels unproductive, like you could build something so much better completely outside of Robocode. But that's what happens when you stop building Robocode bots and start building your own games. :-)
Do you think movement at a base level has been "solved"? That is, do you think that the movement algorithms (actually going places, not classification) can be improved? What about precise prediction, bullet shadows (where they are, not what to do about them), and radar?
I'm not sure, I haven't thought about it in a while. I don't feel like it's solved, but it does feel like a point of diminishing returns. (Well, for me and Skilgannon. The rest of you have work to do. :-P) Then again, that feeling also precedes most breakthroughs.
I do think any general improvements to movement would still fall under the banner of "Wave Surfing". But I certainly think there are improvements. Heck, maybe a lot of them - for all the bots in the rumble and all the activity on the wiki, there's actually very few people in the world that have reached the upper echelons of Robocode and kept trying to improve on the state of the art. I'm sure if 5,000 PhD students spent a few years building Robocode bots, they'd do pretty well. :-)
But I think there's a lot more fertile ground hidden by our metrics, too. We focus pretty strongly on APS. Only a few top bots (eg Shadow, DrussGT, Diamond/Dookious) have any kind of evolved strategy for fighting other strong bots. I'd say we've mostly side-stepped the arms race between adaptive movements and anti-adaptive targeting, which could be pretty interesting.
