Re: Multiple battles headless?

Thought I would follow up on this in case people were interested in the 
results.

Yes, running multiple instances worked fine. I wrote a small java class 
that would sequentially run a selection of robots in battles via 
RobocodeEngine and report results, and my python script would call this a 
bunch of times in parallel (using asyncio) with a different 'chunk' of 
robots and wait for them all to finish. Each process was surprisingly 
consistent with how long it took.

Doing it this way still had an overhead for each time it spun up the 
Robocode engine(s) so there were diminishing returns for adding threads 
(assuming a fixed gene pool/chunk size). Writing the whole thing in java 
and holding onto the Robocode instances is probably the way to go for 
maximum robots tested per hour.

Still, I got massive performance improvements from this so I would 
recommend doing this if you're making a genetic algorithm or something 
similar.

Once again, thanks for the help!

On Monday, 25 January 2021 at 19:32:23 UTC fnl wrote:

> I have not tried to run multiple instances of the RobocodeEngine within 
> the same application.
> So I don't know if it will work, but it should be easy for you to try out.
>
> Regarding accessing resources concurrently, it should not be a problem as 
> long as the robot instance does not write it's data to the same file as 
> another robot instance.
>
> You might also try to run the RobocodeEngine from multiple processes e.g. 
> from a shell/batch script or similar.
>
> Cheers,
> - Flemming
>
> mandag den 25. januar 2021 kl. 20.28.31 UTC+1 skrev [email protected]:
>
>> Just what I wanted, thanks! It will be a bit awkward hooking it up with 
>> what I've got already but it will definitely be faster.
>>
>> On a similar note, do you know if it's safe to run multiple instances of 
>> the engine at the same time, or are there resources that can't be shared 
>> concurrently?
>>
>> Thanks again!
>> On Sunday, 24 January 2021 at 20:26:26 UTC fnl wrote:
>>
>>> You should have a look at the Robocode Control classes, i.e. the 
>>> RobocodeEngine.
>>>
>>> Here is a link to an example. Make sure to click the "Package" on the 
>>> header and scroll down to see the example of how to use the RobocodeEngine 
>>> class:
>>>
>>> https://robocode.sourceforge.io/docs/robocode/index.html?robocode/control/RobocodeEngine.html
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> - Flemming
>>>
>>> lørdag den 23. januar 2021 kl. 22.50.05 UTC+1 skrev [email protected]:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi all, I'm writing a genetic algorithm to build me some robots, and to 
>>>> test them it runs a command like:
>>>>
>>>> `./robocode.sh -battle settings.battle -nodisplay -results 
>>>> roundResults.txt`
>>>>
>>>> for each robot it generates. It's running this for a lot of robots, so 
>>>> the overhead of starting up the application each time takes quite a while.
>>>>
>>>> Is there a way to run multiple battles in one go, or 'hold on' to a 
>>>> single instance of the application that I can call each time for a battle 
>>>> without a display?
>>>>
>>>> In case it matters, I'm running it on ubuntu using Python's subprocess 
>>>> module to fire off the command.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks!
>>>>
>>>

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