JROBOTS Challenges
[2002] [2001] [2000]

Final Results

An exceptional event has happened: IonStorm failed to win in Double mode!
We must thank Tango and its author because, after months of ineffective jrobots uploaded in the arena, now we know that the invincibility of IonStorm was a myth. It doesn't mean that the exploit was simple, in fact only a long work of refinement of Tango made possible this result, but the claims of its author were true. I must congratulate Caos (the author of Tango) on his great work.
Is someone else going to repeat the exploit? Will Tango improve its performances in the other two modes of play? Let's see what's going to happen in the next tournament.

This great event in the history of Jrobots stopped the tentative of IonStorm to break the consecutive triple-victories record of KillerBees, but KillerBees reached the requested percentage to survive strictly only in Double and Team mode. Is another myth going to disappear? I hope not, but the strongness of IonStorm, Mouth, Headhunter and Tango is too high for such an old and glorious jrobot.

The novices Quakeshmock, Cixio and Chaos didn't reach the requested percentage, so they were removed from the arena.

Now you can upload your jrobots to win the January 2003 Jrobots Challenge (January 4^th-25^th 2003) aka No More Triple-Victories?

Final Results

This month IonStorm achieved another Triple-Victory. There are still only 2 tournaments to go and the KillerBees' record will be overtaken. This means that the December and January tournaments are going to be particularly important for IonStorm: Will someone succeed in stopping its long run? I don't think so, or better I'm not able to project a jrobots strong enough... someone else?

Headhunter, KillerBees and Mouth seems to be the only real menace, but their authors haven't coded any improvement in the last tournaments: Maybe their concept can't be improved any more.

The novices Missy, Berserk and Decoy didn't reach the requested percentage, so they were removed from the arena. Bad luck for Missy because it reached almost the 50% percent in single mode. Cixio was uploaded towards the end of the tournament so I can't say anything about it, while Tango seems promising because its author claims to have improved it a lot. Let's see what is going to happen in the next tournament: Is it the jrobot that is going to stop the long run of IonStorm?

Finally, two bad news: the glorious Germ had a lot of problems and got the requested percentage only in team mode with a very small margin, while the strong OneEyedWillyII didn't reach the limit at all. It's another victim of a very competitive arena, but the number of matches was very low this month, so chance played a big role in the final results.

Now you can upload your jrobots to win the December 2002 Jrobots Challenge (December 7^th-28^th 2002) aka Still 2 Triple-Victories Required!

Final Results

After a long wait the 35 EURO PRIZE was finally assigned. No one succeeded in replacing IonStorm in one of the first positions of the three categories, so the winner is... Zeke the author of this GREAT jrobot that is IonStorm. A lot of strong jrobots try to beat it, but only Headhunter reveals itself a real menace, at least in single and double modes, while it is very ineffective in team mode.

KillerBees, Mouth and OneEyedWillyII follow the first positions as usual, while Germ show some difficulty in repeating its old results. The strongest novice of the last tournament, Berserk, confirms its good qualities, but perhaps some weak jrobots helped it to reach safe percentages.

This month novices, Rabbit2, captain and Jason, are more or less too weak for the actual level of the arena and didn't survived. The same happended to PlatoonClone and RoboOlm: the first positions were too competitive.

IonStorm added its fifth month of supremacy... the KillerBees record is near and I hope that its author will appreciate the (long waited) symbolic prize that IonStorm earned so convincingly.

Now you can upload your jrobots to win the November 2002 Jrobots Challenge (November 2^nd-30^th 2002) aka Breaking the KillerBees' Record. I'm sorry to say that finally the prize has gone, but I know that jroboteers play for the glory and nothing else  ;->

Final Results

This month something changed in the placing list, finally. We had to wait a lot of months but now I can say that a new star is born: the novice robot Headhunter reached a surprising good percentage in SINGLE match and its 80% is only 5% away from the great IonStrom. Even the old KillerBees and the versatile Mouth left almost 20% to the power of this new robot.
Even in DOUBLE mode Headhunter was second even if its percentage is comparable to the one of Mouth and KillerBees but...
it placed at the last position in TEAM mode! This is not a surprising results since Headhunter (apparently) doesn't change its strategy in TEAM mode and it's notorious that flocking behaviours (in any form) are important in the last type of play.
OneEyedWillyII is always near the first positions, but its percentages were low and very dangerous this time.

Nothing changed in the first position of the placing lists: the absolute winner is always IonStorm. It collected its fourth month of supremacy. There is still one tournament and the prize of 35 euro will be assigned to someone, finally.

From the novices side, Berserk seems promising and almost reached 50% in DOUBLE match. I hope that a new great robot is going to appear during the next tournament.
Robin was slightly weaker, while Sonicstorm was nothing else that a copy of the sample robot Platoon.

ChestRcopRpot sent the full set of his robots, but only his best ones survived (Mouth is one of these), and a PlatoonClone (maybe slightly modified?). It's a strange thing that such an old-fashioned robot could survive in a competitive arena like this is.

Thanks to all the players for this new great challenge.

Now you can upload your robots to win the September 2002 Jrobots Challenge (September 7^th-October 5^th 2002) aka The Final Fight alias A New Star Is Born. Remember that nobody won the 35 euro prize yet and someone is going to win next time for sure  

Final Results

Nothing new about the Western Front: IonStorm, Mouth, and OneEyedWillyII repeated their placings and Germ confirmed itself the fourth best robots in team mode.
IonStorm collected its third month of supremacy: only two other tournaments and the prize of 35 euro will be awarded to its author.

From the novices side, RoboOlm is very promising and almost reached 40% in single and double match. I think that a great robot is going to appear during the next tournament.
Instead Leech was very weak and I want to underline that this Leech is not my old Leech and I have nothing to do in its development ;->

I've said that there was nothing new about the Western Front, but the Pacific Front brings good news. Finally, the JASTROBOTS project is going to show something. The design was subject to some changes, but I think that now the background of the game is even more interesting and at the same time the original game is going to became more difficult.
If you want to see a short Demo that demostrates the look and feel of the next step of Jrobots, give a look to the "Zeke On Your Six!" Demo Site. To see the Demo you need an accelerated 3D graphics card with OpenGL drivers installed and a Win98 or higher system. You can imagine that it is going to be more interesting (and difficult) to develop the AI of the fighters of the Demo rather those point like thanks of the online Jrobots applet. At the same time, the authors could combat against their own bots with a more complete experience of play.
I hope to have time to add more features to new game possibly with no more changes.
If anyone has comments or suggestions, send them to me at boselli@uno.it. I want to know your opinion about the new background of the game once called JASTROBOTS.

Now you can upload your robots to win the August 2002 Jrobots Challenge (August 3^rd-31^st 2002) aka IonStorm Forever 2. Remember that nobody won the 35 euro prize yet  ;-)

Final Results

IonStorm repeated the exploit of the last contest: it won the three categories of the June 2002 Jrobots Challenge and it is going to kill Jrobots, too ;-)
It collected its second month of supremacy and needs "only" other six tournaments to reach the consecutive triple-victories of KillerBees.
Even the symbolic prize wasn't enough this month to stimulate some player to develop a robot better than IonStorm and I think that the three EURO backnotes will be sent to the author of IonStorm if nothing unexpected happens before september.

So IonStorm confirmed itself the absolute winner of the tournament, while Mouth, KillerBees and OneEyedWillyII repeated the placings of the last tournament. Unfortunately the old good Germ-series lost one of its pieces and GermPlus was removed from the arena since its percentages were below the requested values. Germ survived the contest thanks to its fouth place in team category: the arena needs at least four robots to work properly, because the matches in team mode need four robots, so why not award the fourth classified?

From the novices side, fight, HBanger and KamikazeJack were not able to reach the requested winning percentages. I hope that their authors are not frustrated by such a result, but I know that it's very difficult even for an experienced Jrobots player to write a robot that can reach at least the requested percentage in one category and that's why there are no robots of mine in the arena for the first time from year 2K  :(

Now only FIVE robots are still in the arena and I think that, if nothing extraordinary happens, those robots are going to fight one against the other for a long time.

Now you can upload your robots to win the July 2002 Jrobots Challenge (July 6^th-27^th 2002) aka IonStorm Forever. Remember that nobody won the 35 euro prize yet  ;-)

Final Results

This contest shows a great result: IonStorm won the May 2002 Jrobots Challenge and conquered the Jrobot's GRAND SLAM.
Finally happened again! IonStorm won the three categories of Jrobots repeating the KillerBees's exploit of year 2000. KillerBees held its position for eight tournaments and I'm curious to see if anyone is going to beat IonStorm soon at least in one category, so...
I'm going to award the future winners of Jrobots with the following prizes:
The next winner (other than IonStorm) of the Single Mode will receive a 5 euro banknote, the Double Mode winner will receive a 10 euro banknote and, finally, the Team Mode winner will receive a 20 euro banknote. If no one is going to beat IonStorm before the end of the September 2002 Jrobots Challenge, the author of IonStorm will receive the full set of banknotes, otherwise only some of them.
I've chosen the usual euro prizes to follow the tradition started on January and I've preferred those small banknotes because they posses long holographic stripes, while the large banknotes have a smaller hologram ;->. Obviously, it's only a symbolic prize as usual, but it's less symbolic than the last one.

While IonStorm is the absolute winner of the tournament, thanks to a fine tuning of the Team Mode strategy, Mouth has got three very good second places revealing itself the absolute second best robot in the arena. The old but still strong KillerBees had to be satisfied with a third place in Single Mode and Double Mode, while Germ is third in Team Mode. The other two robots that survived to this challenge are GermPlus and OneEyedWillyII.

Now the bad news: Myst, Fish and 845bytes are dead. The first two were strong old-aged robots that suffered the competition in the arena, while the last one was the smallest-strongest robot ever written.
From the novices side: sushkin lost his robots dr1 and dr2. The first was not too bad as its percentage testify.
Finally, I've lost my DirtyCoward and no other robots of mine are still around in the arena: It's time to think about new strategies :(
Only SIX robots are now in the arena! And the Alan Lund's Watch utility foresees that only IonStorm and Mouth are going to survive to the next challenge, but since the Team Mode needs at least four robots to work, if no other robot will be uploaded in the arena, I'll save at least the first four placed of the Team List.

Now you can upload your robots to win the June 2002 Jrobots Challenge (June 1^st-29^th 2002) aka IonStorm's GRAND SLAM!

Final Results

During the last contest we experimented the effect of the Virtual Clock Generator on the on-line arena.
As you know, the machine dependency of Jrobots was a great problem in the past months: A lot of players complaint because their robots didn't work as they expected in the online arena and the winning percentages were always lower than the percentages they got offline during the test phase.

Finally, it seems that a solution was found and I want to thank again Alan Lund and Walter Nisticò for planning the new clock that beates the time of the matches and for the code they wrote, but...
yes, there is a but: In fact, we couldn't expect that all the robots in the arena were going to react well to the virtual time. Reading the results of the latest challenge, we see that Mouth gained a placing in Single Mode and becomes the best robots in Team Mode with a convincing gap from the second placed.

The new clock gives to the robots more time to think and no more blackouts occur when the CPU is busy in other operations. The Team Mode shows clearly that the native thread scheduler gave very few time to each robot, while now all the 32 robots has enough time to think, slowing down the simulation, of course. Well, designing a Team Match with four teams of eight robots each was a poor choice and the virtual clock demonstates it with no doubts.

Slightly different behaviours apart, now we can be sure that the arena works fine in a wide range of conditions, or at least better than before.
The alternative solution to the clock generator was a interpreter of Java bytecode and I'm trying to write it for JASTROBOTS. As you remember, the first version of the "JVM written in Java" was one thousand times slower than native Java: a very disappointing result. Now I've implemented a number of memory hungry optimizations and the highest speed I've reached is only 25 times slower (the test code was a cycle filled with arithmetic operations on integers, float and doubles). I think it is a good result, so this solution seems to be slower, obviously, but it is also feasible.

This month the defeated robots are: IlTristoSmorzatore (an old robot strong in Single Mode but very weak in other kind of matches), 1070bytes (the smallest effective robot around), OneEyedWilly (the ancestor of OneEyedWillyII), Parasite (that belonged to the group of the Germ-series) and, finally, the novices Malaysian and Cougar. Only 9 robots are now in the arena!
The winner of single and double category is still IonStrom and the virtual clock generator effect moved it to the second place in Team Mode, while Germ and GermPlus suffered it and lost places.

Using the Alan Lund's Watch utility (that you can download from the Files section of the mailing list), we can foresee that only 3 robots are going to survive the next challenge, if nothing new happens: They are KillerBees, Mouth and IonStrom. All the other robots can't gain the requested percentages to survive. The foresight considers a lower number of matches respect to a normal tournament (744/789/207) and I hope that the reality is going to be not so destructive.
If we run out of robots, I'm planning to organize a several months long monster summer challenge, including in the online arena all the best versions of the 131 robots that partecipated to the Jrobots Challenges in the past two years. I know it's a crazy idea, maybe even not useful or impracticable, but I'm sure that some old robot will perform better using the new simulator and I am curious to see a Jrobots all-times placing list ;-)

Now you can upload your robots to win the May 2002 Jrobots Challenge (May 4^th-25^th 2002) aka Only One Is Going To Survive!

Final Results

As we expected, even this month a lot of great long aged robots were eliminated. They are: Marvin3, Schmamageddon and Epa1 (the last was the oldest of the three). Now the oldest robots still around in the arena are KillerBees (the bullet, that is going to eliminate it, is not forged yet) and IlTristoSmorzatore (a robot strong in single matches, but very weak in other play modes).
The arena IS very competitive and the percentages testify it. Now almost only the top six robots reach the 50% limit in single and double mode and in team mode the percentages are closer than ever. Now the higher percentage doesn't touch the 40%, thanks to an improved IonStorm that now performs well even in team play.
The Alan Lund's Watch.exe utility (that you can download from the Files section of the mailing list) can be used to foresee the future: As you can see yourself, a lot of other robots are in great danger. But we can't trust those previsions very much, because the next challenge is going to use the new virtual clock generator to beat the thinking time of the robots (read virtualClockGenerator.txt for details).

The winner of single and double category is still IonStrom and this month it has got a good third place in team mode, very close to the winner GermPlus and the other strong teams Germ and Mouth.

From the novices' side, Touche, First, Malaysian and UPMKainghe didn't succeed in surviving the hard competition. The last two robots were written using the new Java 2 JDK 1.4 and, at the beginning, the number of their matches was always zero even if all the other robots could play matches and matches. Finally, I discovered that the new JDK uses the 1.2 class format by default instead of 1.1 as the JDK 1.3 did. The majority of the machines that run the tournaments still use the Microsoft JVM that doesn't recognize the 1.2 class format  :( so you'd better to use the compiler option -target 1.1, if you don't want to lose a lot of matches.

Finally, this challenge accepted robots of 20Kb size, but only a few robots chose to broke the old 10Kb limit. One of these was IonStorm and we can see that the only 1001 bytes added over the limit were of great help: It almost succeeded in winning the three categories, a result we saw when KillerBees was GREAT.

Now you can upload your robots to win the April 2002 Jrobots Challenge (April 6^th-27^th 2002) aka The Virtual Clock Generator Contest

Final Results

I'm so sad. This challenge saw the last battles of four great long aged robots. They are: LvRDumber, MontyZ, Pulse1 and NeoMonty. The arena became very competitive and now it's really difficult to survive againt strong robots like IonStrom, KillerBees, Mouth, 1070bytes, Germ and GermPlus. Only ten robots reach the 50% limit in single and double mode, while the winning percentage in team mode is now very low respect to the percentages we saw not too much time ago.
Now the oldest robot still alive is KillerBees and it doesn't seem to leave the arena too soon. There is an interesting analysis we can make with the Alan Lund's Watch.exe utility (that you can download from the Files section of the mailing list): If nothing changes in the composition of the arena, the next robots that are going to leave us are Firetron, Schmamageddon, Parasite and Epa1. Then follow IlTristoSmorzatore, OneEyedWillyII, Marvin3, Fish. Finally, 1070bytes. During three contest we are going to lose a lot of great and strong robots. The analysis is made on a low number of matches, so the results are not reliable, but some of the authors should improve they robots within a month or they should hope in the upload of some weak robots ;->

As you can see from the placing list, the winner of single and double category is still IonStrom. The second news is the appearing of an update of Mouth and a surprising 1070bytes, which are very versatile. I thought that my old short lived 774bytes was unbeatable in the almost 1Kb category, but 1070bytes gets higher percentages with very few lines of code. A great result that resembles the success of the other old small robot 1kilobyte.
In the team category the Germ-series succeeded in beating OneEyedWilly. These three robots and KillerBees have very similar strenghts and it's difficult for the other challengers to reach the 40% level.

From the novices' side, FuzzFighter failed to survive again, even if its author improved it a bit. Simply there were no weak robots this time to save valuable robots.
Then, this challenge saw the Wolf1 affair. As you can see, I've removed it even if its percentage in single mode is above 50%. You can read the thread about Wolf1 on the mailing-list. Simply, the first version was a clone of IonStorm and reached the 70% in a hundred of matches, then the author was asked to upload an original (even if weak) version and the robot and it felt down to 50% after a little more of 150 matches, so I think that the real value of the original version doesn't deserve to survive.

Finally, a few notes about bdj1. This robot was a quite straightforward clone of a robot of mine: Platoon. Now there are no more fast runners in the arena and the aiming technique of DirtyCoward with no corrections is going to be more effective. I needn't to say that a fast runner like Platoon is an unpleasant thing for DirtyCoward, but now... ;->

A quick note about future improvements in the SDK of Jrobots. Before the beginning of the next challenge are going to be available some new extensions and other features. Since the authors reported to me some problems with the new thread scheduler, the next challenge will use the old one: It's better to wait than experiment.
However, the only thing that you can rely on is the new size of the robots: Now they can be more than 10Kb in size, but less than 20Kb. I hope that you can make a good use of all that space, but you must remember the lesson that 1070bytes teaches you ;)

Now you can upload your robots to win the March 2002 Jrobots Challenge (March 2^nd-30^th 2002) aka The 20Kb Jrobots Contest

Final Results

First of all, this challenge saw the achievement of a great result: After 13 months of victories, KillerBees failed to win at least in one type of play. This result needed a lot of efforts, but it's not the end of a hard struggle, in fact there are rumors of a KillerBees2 waiting for the end of KillerBees. Are we going to see it appearing in the next challenge?

Then, for the first time in the history of Jrobots there was something offered as a prize to the winners of the three categories. It is a very symbolic prize: A complete set of EURO coins for a total amount of 388 eurocents. It's the first time that several countries adopt the same currency with one accord, so I thought that even Jrobots ought to celebrate the event. I hope that the winners will appreciate the prize.

As you can see from the placing list, the winners are Zeke (author of IonStorm - winner in single and double categories) and chestRcopRpot (author of OneEyedWilly - winner in team category). Zeke decided to transfer one of his two prizes to WalterNistico (author of KillerBees) in honour of KillerBees' valour and I'm planning to give another prize to Critter (the author of Germ - second placed in team category) because he lacked the victory for 7 matches lost over more than 700, really near to a surprising OneEyedWilly.

The weighted selection strategy seems to work well, surely better than random selection and bubble-sort placings selection. As you can see, the first robots in the placing list has more probability to play a match. This choice improves the winning percentage of the best robots and the reliableness of the results.

IonStorm won in single mode with its usual percentage above 80% and in double mode it beated KillerBees with a gap of 4%. OneEyedWilly won in team mode and repeated the exploit it already made in October 2001. Its performances are not so regular and Germ is so near to it that I can't say which of the two is the strongest in a weighted challenge. The test I've made on my machine says that Germ is stronger than OneEyedWilly, but the machine dependency of Jrobots is unpredictable. We'll see what's going to happen in the next challenge.

From the novices' side, there were a lot of new challengers, but none of them survived. The best of them was FuzzFighter. With two victories in team play it could reach the 25% limit and survive, but I'm sure that teofuzz (author of FuzzFighter) has already a stronger version ready to be uploaded.

Finally, someone asked me why Leech and DirtyCoward performed so bad in this challenge. Well, I had an idea for new good tune-ups, but they reveled themselves not so good. Next time I'll be more conservative :)

Now you can upload your robots to win the February 2002 Jrobots Challenge (February 2^nd-23^rd 2002) aka No More KillerBees?