Re: Robocode competition at work

Thank you for sharing the information about your event, and I am happy to learn that you all enjoyed yourselves. :-)

Once in a while, 3-4 friends of mine and I have similar competition, except that we "play" for typically a day or two in a row.
Each second we deliver the robots as a robot package (.jar + source) on a shared DropBox folder, and have a competition. Typically, 1-by-1 competition or melee (all participant robots) in the battlefield, but using a 1200 x 1200 arena. We don't start from scratch anymore, but build on top of our existing robots, as most of us have made our own "basic framework" with various methods and strategies. Each of us have a preferred way that the/our framework should work, so taking stuff from the net is not always good for us as it does not fit into our structure.

For example, I have several classes for handling these parts almost individually: MovementStrategy (with anti-movement as well for bullet dodging etc.), RadarStrategy, GunStrategy, and various of virtual guns that scores points for each "virtual hit" on a robot. The gun with biggest score is the one that is used for real on the individual robot. A friend of mine mix all parts together and move based on "gravity fields" using polar coordinates for avoiding danger like, robots, walls, fired bullets etc., and then uses a neural net for training his gun.

Lately, we have not had time for coding robots, which is a shame.

Cheers,
- Flemming

--- In [email protected], tobbe@... wrote:
>
> 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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