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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."
Robocode is great. Its a neat exercise to get people intersted in OOP and Java.
Being a Java programmer, I've also looked at C# and seen what MS did to improve the language (lets face it, C# took the good things of Java, and fixed the bad things in Java).
The C# version of robocode?
Terrarium, and damn is it fun (I just wish you could change the stats of your offspring to 'adapt' instead of/in addition to just passing off AI)!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The Robocode Rumble is over and the winners have been declared. Who are they and what are the secrets of their success?
When the slashdotting slows, I expect something like:
Champ: "Well, I write a lot of viruses. The skillsets are very similar actually. You set it loose and it needs self-contained smarts to destroy anything and everything without getting caught or stopped."
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sorry, but some things seem to be VERY similar to Robot Battle, a pretty old game with the same concept: www.robotbattle.com
Not trying to troll.. just wanted to point out.
I don't have a lot of java experience, but I tried this to try to get that experience. Unfortunately, no matter what cool stuff I put in my bot, the tutorial bots beat it on a regular basis. :(
I think one of the problems was that the way I wrote it, it could fire more shots than average. Unfortunately, you lose a bit of energy with every shot, so all my missed shots led to my bot typically just shooting until a single shot by an opponent killed it. D'oh
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
There's a similar AI robotic combat program Tech tv did a story on called MelBotWars.
It's basically a plugin for maya which uses the MEL(Maya Embedded Language) programming language for coding your bot's AI, and uses the rigidBody dynamics in Maya for the physics.
Also, take note that you only need the Maya personal learning edition to use it, which is free.
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).
Your generalizing too much here. There are many types of AI, and many languages to do them in. Each language is an abstraction of the problem space you are working in, so rather than making a blanket statement about a good language for AI, you should pair up the AI your talking about with a preferred language.
1) Genetic algorithms are probably in the category you are talkng about. Good ones take massive processor power to come up with. Once they are done though, the end result is generally small and fast. This type of AI is usefull fr finding a near optimal solution in a complex but static problem space, ie What is the best wing design for this airplane. C, C++, Assembly are typically good languages.
2) Neural networks. These can take up alot of processing power, or not, depending on their complexity. There is a rather large family of these also, existing in both asynchronous and synchronous forms. These are used to pattern match and generalize. Good for things like handwriting recognition. C++, Java are pretty good languages.
3) Pattern matching knowledge databases. These are good at cross referencing data by finding subtle patterns in it. The construction of the database and pattern finding is intensive, but use typically is not. Lisp, Java, SQL, Perl can be good here.
4) Expert systems. Used to categorize information for retrieval based on a information given by the user. Not at all processor intensive. Lisp, java good for this.
5) State machines. This is where our Robocode fits in. Very object like, I can hardly think of a better language than Java for it's simplicity. These are not very processor intensive. C++, or C# might be good candidates.
6) High level applied systems, lumping in natural language processing, vision recognition, etc.. These are generally heavy duty specialized systems that can be very data and processor intensive. C++ is a good general purpose choice for these, but each needs to be looked at individually.
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.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
This is a topic I've been interested in for a while, but I've yet to see any good information to start me off...
credo quia absurdum
Java3D actually uses OpenGL (or DirectX) as the underlying rendering layer on many platforms. See here...
I used to code robots for RoboWar (for the Mac) in the early 90's. It was great fun. It's so old you need the wayback machine to see a page:
RoboWar
bp
Rumblecode creator Mat Nelson: "Today, Java is fast, though many people still do not realize it. Computer speed has increased at an amazing rate, JVMs are faster than ever, Java has matured, and we even have hardware-accelerated graphics. Java is ready for the client now, and I hope Robocode can help to prove it."
c-hack.com |
Hi
If anyone's interested, here is a description of Fermat's movement algorithm described more clearly along with other silly questions. This is the original set of answers I submitted to them.
And if you're even more interested, visit Robocode Repository for all the test bots and related information you will ever need.
Arun Kishore
[about to sleep...]
blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.
CORE WARS, devised in the 60's, played in the mid 80's, this was what you did!
Now the sadness: I had both corewars and robo war for my mac plus. Guess which one I wrote bots for? That's right! NEITHER.
Is there anything worse than a lazy geek?!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Just fyi.
:)
The orignal Robbocode was intented to help people learn Java by tinkering your own robot (in Java Class) to fight the others robots running by the computers. The sole purpose is to help people learn Java.
May be inspired by the other online combat projects I don't know, but people soon find it to be more fun to fight online, thus Robocode Rumble was born.
The purpose of Robocode and Robcode Rumble is to encourage people to learn and use Java. You might wonder why it's by IBM not SUN. In case you don't realize, the biggest employer of Java on earth is not SUN, but IBM.