Robocode Rumble: Tips From the Champs

Jason writes "The Robocode Rumble is over and the winners have been declared. Who are they and what are the secrets of their success? Dana Barrow talks shop with some of the mad scientists behind the winning Javabots and with Mat Nelson, who reveals what he has planned for Robocode 2.0. You can get the free download here."

Comments

Re:Robocode's Rival

[dmorin]

Say what we want about java's failure to do true "write once, run anywhere", but MS has its own version of that. I tried to run Terrarium on my NT box and couldn't do it because I can't get the most recent DirectX. So there. That never happens with Java. Don't ask why my office machine is NT. I don't want to talk about it.

genetically generated code?

[ceswiedler]

Why not do it genetically? I'm not an expert on the subject, but the way I've always thought is that it's clearly possible to "breed" programs to do a particular task, as long as the task is very "ratable", i.e., you have a separate algorithm which will evaluate how well the program did. In this case, the "arena" program which pits the bots against each other serves very well. Generate random Java bytecode, run it as a bot, look at the points scored. Breed well-performing bots with each other by combining bytecode together in various fashions. Repeat several billion times...

Obviously, the first N iterations wouldn't be syntactically correct bytecode (though I would suggest that you hard-code the 0xCAFEBABE prefix) and would probably throw exceptions almost immediately (resulting in disqualification). Eventually, however, you'd get a program which would at least not produce errors, even if it did nothing productive like moving and shooting.

What's the best way to combine two bytecode programs to produce offspring which are similar-yet-different, and have the best chance of doing well? You would obviously want a chance of mutation (possibly reducing over time).

Re: genetically generated code?

[FortKnox]

I don't think the issue is with 'Java' as much as it is with 'Robocode'. Robocode does its battles graphically. To really get a good genetic AI going, you want it all done in memory so you can whip through a ton ov evolutionary steps ASAP.

A good friend of mine did a genetic algorithm problem as a senior design project in school. It was REALLY cool (but was not done graphically).

Perhaps if you modified Robocode itself to have a 'memory' mode, then after a buncha evolutionary steps, bring the latest one in for a graphical battle?

Re: RealTimeBattle

[Antity]

RealTimeBattle is cool. BTW, you can write your Bots in any language since communication is done using stdio.

I wrote a bot for RealTimeBattle once ("Defensive Attack" - funny that this beast is still available) and found it to be real fun. I was a bit distracted that for the IBM project you could only use Java. With new experiments like this, I like to be able to use the language I'm best in.