Re: RE: Robocode competition at work

[email protected]
Newsgroups gmane.comp.java.robocode
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi

About time I get back to you guys about the competition that was held on  
the 20th of April.

Eight of my coworkers decided to take part in the competition. None of them  
had any prior knowledge of Robocode. So I randomly paired them to form four  
two-player teams.
The rules I stated was that the battle would take place on a 700x700 field  
and that the robots had to be nanobots or microbots. Both ideas I've gotten  
from this mail thread - thank you guys!

We had about three effective hours of coding. (We were told we would have  
four, but a little time was lost in the beginning and the end...)

A little more than an hour in to the competition I asked for everyones  
robots, with sources. This served two purposes. First: All teams got to  
practice delivering a robot while still relatively calm. I knew it would be  
hectic at the end of the competition as everyone wants to get that last  
feature in! And Second: I got a chance to look at all the source code to  
see that they were all making realistic progress ( = not too much  
copy/pasting from internet).

In the end three of the teams ended up copy/pasting bits and pieces of the  
sample robots that comes with robocode and one team wrote everything from  
scratch. The "everything from scratch"-team came second in the overall  
tournament. I think they did a great job! We all had a great time and  
everyone thought three hours was not enough time. They thought about eight  
hours would have been good.

I decided to run the final battle in front of all my coworkers with the two  
finalist teams up on the stage. Everyone was cheering and clapping hands.  
And laughing when one of the bots did something stupid! It was a real crowd  
pleaser!

Thanks for your help and inspiration!

//Tobbe
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