Shielding Success Rates Mystery
Running some tests now. Starting with 20 seasons, single-threaded on the Ubuntu/OpenDJK setup. 10 seasons in and see it failing a lot vs Virus (~76%), rarely vs Crusader (~90%), and working well vs Hydra (96%). I'll post more details and the full RoboRunner logs when I've got some more data, and try it through the UI to see what I can tell about skipped turns.
If it is a skipped turns issue, I know there is one trick to put heavy initialization stuff in a static block and it won't count against your CPU time. I really hate Robocode's skipped turn setup, though I think limiting the CPU time in general is great. I'm definitely taking a different approach in BerryBots. It's probably too late to completely change it in Robocode, but we could at least look at an average over the last 5 or 100 ticks and penalize based on that instead (which is part of what I'm going to do).
Wow, ok.. So 4 threads was slightly worse overall, but 20 seasons is hardly enough to cover the margin of error. Now testing on Windows, and at 98 overall score after 8+ seasons. This is Oracle Java 7. Also interesting to note that the CPU constant was set to about 5 ms in Windows, vs 7 in Linux. Also this is all on Robocode 1.7.4.0, sorry about that, but I don't think it makes a difference.
Ok, still want to test on Ubuntu 64-bit and with the Oracle JVM on Linux, but here's a bunch of data for now.
| config | Virus | Hydra | Crusader | Total |
| Linux/OJDK/1 thread | 76.14 +- 8.29 | 95.93 +- 0.37 | 89.26 +- 5.17 | 87.11 +- 2.66 |
| Linux/OJDK/4 threads | 81.45 +- 7.6 | 82.77 +- 6.51 | 90.91 +- 5.14 | 85.04 +- 2.92 |
| Windows/1 thread | 98.89 +- 0.25 | 96.09 +- 0.33 | 98.67 +- 0.34 | 97.88 +- 0.17 |
| Windows/2 threads | 97.18 +- 1.91 | 96.31 +- 0.35 | 98.92 +- 0.3 | 97.47 +- 0.48 |
| Windows/3 threads | 95.4 +- 3.19 | 96.39 +- 0.23 | 88.88 +- 5.49 | 93.56 +- 1.55 |
| Windows/4 threads | 98.66 +- 0.31 | 92.2 +- 3.5 | 92.42 +- 4.31 | 94.43 +- 1.41 |
It's worth noting that I feel comfortable running my own benchmarks 6-threaded on this machine and I usually run 4 RoboRumble clients at a time.
Thank you, Voidious, for all the data. Don't forget to take a peak at skipped turns under Linux/OJDK. It gets printed to the game log, and you can also check what is printed in the SkippedTurns text file it writes to the data directory.
For now, I'm going with the assumption that I need to target reducing initialization overhead due to skipped turns. Once I have that done, I can prepare another version of XanderCat, which if I'm lucky you will be willing to run through your Linux/OJDK setup again to see how it changes things.
