webots contest

Hi all,

First of all congratulations to the newcomers, it's nice to see some
new robots and the contest is getting more and more interesting. I
have a few questions:

1)      I haven't noticed any change at all in my robot between webots 4 and 5.
Are the physics of the game definitive until the end of the
contest or is there a chance that they change before May 1st? You
(Olivier) have been talking a few months ago about a self-collision
test but it would probably break many robot moves….  Since there
are now less than two months to go, in my opinion it is time to
"freeze" the physics so that everybody can focus on building moves
that will not have to be changed.

2)      I have been following the evolution of the hall of fame since last
summer and it is very interesting to notice that it has been changing
a lot all the time even when the robots were hardly ever updated.
ToddlerInSnowSuit is from far the best ( at the moment ;-) ) but it
seems to me that the other robots in the top 10 all have a chance
against each other. There are very often scores like 4/3 or 5/4 so in
order to have a more stable hall of fame and less random in the
rankings, I think it would be a good idea to increase the number of
sets for the top robots: for example 20 winning sets for ranks 1-5, 15
winning sets for ranks 6-10 and 10 winning sets for ranks 11-15. A
round would last a bit longer but I don't think this is a problem, and
it would also give more feedback about a robot's behavior and bigger
opportunities to adapt the robot's strategy to the current score in
the controller ( if one tactic is not successful, try something else )
What do the other competitors think about that?

3)      Webots doesn't react exactly the same on all platforms and the
possibility of playing off-contest matches is a great improvement
compared to last year, it gives us the opportunity to try our
robot moves on the server without having to wait for a day, I really
like it. At the moment only one set per match is run in off-contest
games. Would that be possible to play for example a 5 sets match
instead, so that we can download several sets at once and try
different things according to the score without having to upload a new
controller after each set or use a random strategy choice?

4)      It sometimes happens that the round crashes. What happens if webots
crashes during an off-contest match, is it still possible to continue
running off-contest matches after the crash or is the server
unavailable? And would that be possible to create a small program that
would check at the end of the round if the last game was played, and
if not re-run the round from where it crashed (by counting the wva
files for example )?

5)      Is it not possible anymore to upload a zip file on the server?
I tried it yesterday afternoon and it didn't work, but uploading the files
one by one was fine.

Thanks to Olivier and Good luck all!

Xavier (Kubiak)


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