JROBOTS Challenges
[2001] [2000]

Final Results

Finally we know which are the best robots of the year 2001. The bubble-sort selection strategy used to choose the fighting robots did its job. As we can see from the final percentages this selection rule can cause a lot of problems, but it emphasizes the percentages of the strongest robots and this is the aim of the finals.
And the winners are... IonStorm and KillerBees. This is not a surprise, because these two robots dominate the latest challenge, but the interactions of the robots with the bubble-sort selection were unpredicatable in advance.
Well, since December 14^th the bubble-sort selection wasn't pure due to a bug in the selection algorithm: The first opponent of every robot was chosen at random, then the following matches apply the new selection mode. Thanks to Zeke (the author of IonStorm) I discovered the bug and, from December 15^th on, the tournament used the correct rule and the robots in the middle of the placement list began to drift towards 50%. The final percentages are so near that I used a 48%-48%-24% percentage limit to remove the losers. I think that such a choice saved some robots that had only bad luck in a few matches. The next challenge will use a smart selection strategy proposed by Zeke called Weighted Selection Rule (more on this later).

So the final results crowned IonStorm and KillerBees as the stongest robot of this year (and even of the past years). IonStorm is unbeatable in single mode and its percentage (89%) testify it. Then seven robots follow: They are IlTristoSmorzatore, DirtyCoward, KillerBees, Leech, OneEyedWillyII and Schmamageddon and got almost the same percentage because their relative strongness is very similar even if they use very different strategies. In double mode the gaps among the percentages are narrower, but it's incontrovertible that the strongest are IonStorm and KillerBees, with a little percentage in favour of the latter. Finally, there is the neat victory of KillerBees in team mode with almost a 10% gap from the good Fish. It's evident that KillerBees is more versatile, but IonStorm is very specialized and its author is working to a more specialized team-fighter. Then follows the OneEyedWilly series, that is very versatile, too. We'll see new incredible results in the next challenge.

From the novices' side, there are not very surprising robots. A lot of the brand new robots were thrown out of the arena because they didn't reach the requested victory-matches ratio. The best ones were DirtyCoward, Leech, Parasite and Cycler.
Cycler is the first robot that uses the JJVector extensions. I think that adding more extensions to the API of Jrobots will be an advantage for all the players. Cycler suffered the bubble-sort selection and it was confined in the middle of the list.
Parasite has good percentages but it was uploaded later in the tournament. In the next challenge it will have more time to show its real value.
Finally, there are Leech and DirtyCoward. They are both robots of mine and finally I've got a good placement after months of poor results. The story of DirtyCoward is interesting, so I tell you about it. First came Leech and its name tells its strategy: it runs toward the enemy to try a close fight, but it runs away if the damages are too much to arrive close to the enemy. I've found that the escape following a zig-zag path is a good strategy and the placements testify it: Even IonStorm suffered injuries from Leech at the beginning of the challenge (then it was modified :< ). So followed DirtyCoward that made the escape its reason to live, no more close combat, only flee away and keep a distance of 700 meters from the enemy... I hope you can learn something from this story :). Another strategy that DirtyCoward uses is to drop the aiming correction techniques, a good choice in an arena full of robots that follow complex paths and walk back on their steps.

Now you can upload your robots to win the January 2002 Jrobots Challenge (January 5^th-26^th 2002) aka The Weighted Challenge

Best wishes of a Happy New Year!

Final Results

It still seems incredible, but it happened again! However it's not the same unbelivable result of the latest challenge: This time KillerBees was defeated by IonStorm in single play, but OneEyedWilly didn't repeat its exploit in the team category.
This means that KillerBees and IonStorm in single play (the same is true for KillerBees and OneEyedWilly in team play) are stronger than the other robots and we can make the final choice between them only considering direct matches. This is the reason why the next challenge (the 2001 Jrobots Finals) will change the usual rules for the challenges: The Battle Applet will perform a bubble-sort tournament; in other words every robots will fight against its direct neighbours in the placement list. I think that this kind of play-off play-out for every single piece of the placement list is better to test the relative strongness of robots than the usual random choice of matches.

KillerBees dominated the finals of the last year and we'll see if it will repeat the exploit as in the Second Millennium Jrobots Finals. The result of IonStorm demonstrates one more time that nothing is impossible: KillerBees can fail (for bad chances)! It's still the more versatile robots, but it's not invincible.

On the novices side, there is a promising OneEyedWillyII (more regular in the three types of play than OneEyedWilly), a honest Mouth, a still young Dodger and a very surprising 1Kilobyte that survived in the arena with a code size of less than 1 kilobyte!

Now the bad news (for me): I've lost Stinger2, Platoon2 and the ambitious 774bytes; for the first time I've no more robots of mine in the arena! I need to work hard on my next robot in a short time :(
Finally, Sloth didn't survive and DarketGT, too. The latter was harmful, but it won two or three matches (don't ask me how) .

Now you can upload your robots to win the 2001 Jrobots Finals (December 1^st-29^th 2001) aka The Bubble-Sort Challenge

Final Results

It seems incredible, but it is true! KillerBees was defeated by OneEyedWilly in the team category. It seems even more incredible if we remember that KillerBees was the dominator of the arena since the Second Millennium Jrobots Finals (on December 2000). I hope that this astounding result of OneEyedWilly makes other players believe that nothing is impossible: even KillerBees fails!
OneEyedWilly has got a very good percentage over KillerBees (61% versus 53%). I think that the gap is deep enough to prevent different results (due to random fluctuations), but we could answer to the "Will it happen again?" question only at the end of the next challenge.
I need not to say that the percentages of KillerBees are still unreachable in single and double categories because its fire power and aim are the strongest amongst the current robots. I haven't discovered yet the secret of OneEyedWilly, but I think it's a mixture of several qualities with a strong team spirit.
The other new robot (Schmamageddon) confirms its attitude for single play and its lacks in the other types of play.

On the new entries side, Mouth seems very promising. It didn't reach the requested limit of played matches, but it's ready for the next challenge and its placements say that another die-hard robot is born.

This month three more veterans were thrown out of the arena: Kamikaze, Imatron and Sharks (again). Firetron, Jimbo, Sloth and Stinger2 are ready to be thrown out in the next challenge since their percentage margin is very thin. Don't expect to see a Sharks2 and Stinger3 very soon, because I'm desperately looking for good aim and fire techniques, since mine are very poor. (Have you anything to suggest? Send it to me in email, thanks! ;-> )

Now you can upload your robots to win the November 2001 Jrobots Challenge (November 3^rd-24^th 2001) aka Will it happen again?

Final Results

This month no more veterans were thrown out of the arena. There is only the fail of the young Dragon (a never refined robot of mine that followed an interesting path) and the youger Pirhana (in spite of its name, its performance is far from the one of the strong Fish and the weak Sharks). A more thought version of Pirhana will get better results, if its author doesn't surrend so soon.
There are two surprises in the higher positions of the list: Two brand-new robots appeared in the first six placements with nice percentages. They performs well in only one type of play. In single matches Schmamageddon shows a good 63% but is very weak in other types of play because its author haven't implemented yet a friend identification algorithm and his robots fire each other. In team matches OneEyedWilly got an incredible 54% (only 3.5% away from KillerBees and better than Myst - the weaker clone of KillerBees) and it gained the second place of the list. With a lucky tournament OneEyedWilly could replace KillerBees without any change in its code: We are waiting for such an event so long :)
A bad news for me is that bdj1 (a clone of the old Platoon) performs better than my new Platoon2. This latter robot runs at 100% speed all around the arena as Platoon do, but it adopts an aim correction algorithm to foresee the positions of the enemies when the missile arrives on the target; since bdj1 performs better, I think that this kind of correction (or at least my implementation) is not so useful in an arena where the majority of robots follows an irregural path :(

Now you can upload your robots to win the October 2001 Jrobots Challenge (October 6^th-27^th 2001) aka The Raise of the Novices.

Final Results

Month after month we see the fall of all the veterans of the arena. The last challenge saw the defeat of Tiny, DareDevil, Ciaky, Phalanx; now other old aged robots are thrown out of the arena: Stinger, MarmotteAgile, Platoon, MarukoV4 and Vampire. The latest three robots battled in the arena since the early beginning of these competitions, but the rank of the challengers was very high in the Summer 2001 Jrobots Challenge and some of them can't survive without some revitalizing fight agaist weak robots.
The strong robots are always the same: KillerBees, Myst, IlTristoSmorzatore, Fish, the Monty series. Other robots such as Pulse1, Epa1, LvRDumber, Jimbo and Marvin3 suffered the new composition of the arena.
The new entries Sloth and bdj1 didn't reach the requested limit of matches to accept their results, but they got the requested victory-matches ratio and they can show their value in the next challenge.
bdj1 is a clone of Platoon (MORE or less the same robot), so the concept of Platoon still survives even if the original was removed.

Now you can upload your robots to win the September 2001 Jrobots Challenge (September 8^th-29^th 2001) aka The Veterans' Fall.

Final Results

We had a dream: the end of KillerBees :). Now that dream is broken because the promising Myst failed to beat it. It didn't matter that Myst was almost the same robot, we wanted a new winner, but KillerBees got again very high percentages in all the three categories.
Other robots that got good placements are NeoMonty, IlTristoSmorzatore, Myst, Fish and Epa1. They are known good robots, but there are even two brand-new entries (Imatron and Firetron) that reached good placements.

Now the bad news: Tiny, DareDevil, Ciaky, Phalanx and the youngest KafeBot are out of the arena because they didn't reach the requested limit of victories-matches percentage in the three categories. They were old aged good robots, but now there is a keen competition in the arena and it's a hard life for our little robots.
Finally, even Lucky is out of the game. Its fire algorithm was to fire randomly all around: in spite of its name, it wasn't lucky enough to survive and it's surprising that it won a match over 307 matches played :)

Now you can upload your robots to win the Summer 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees rules!.

Final Results

This time two robots almost succeeded in beating KillerBees. The first one is IlTristoSmorzatore: it got a good percentage in single match but it's poor in other types of play. The second one is Myst, a clone of KillerBees written by another author. This robot is not the same as KillerBees, but it's very similar so I think that its author has (slightly) modified the source of KillerBees. Since it was uploaded a week after the start of the challenge it didn't reach the limit necessary to validate its results. In the next challenge we'll see if those changes make Myst a better KillerBees.
However, KillerBees won all the three categories for the fifth time in the history of Jrobots.

This challenge brought us good news: Fish is back and it's stronger than ever. I wish to thank WalterNistico; he removed an annoying bug of Fish and now we can see its real power.
Some of the robots uploaded during the last challenge revealed theirself very weak. The result is that eight robots were removed from the arena.

Now you can upload your robots to win the May-June 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka Did Myst killed KillerBees?.

Final Results

KillerBees won all the three categories for the fourth time in the history of Jrobots. This game is going to be very tedious :)

This time the simulator ran in real time and we can see some changes in the results because Jrobots is a machine dependent simulation :(
These results are nearest to the real experience than the ones of the previous challenges, so the next tournament is set to real time speed, too.

One of the greatest differences in the results is the fail of Fish. It appeared for the first time in one of the challenges of the last year (November 2000). It was a promising robot and for the first time in Jrobots history it was going to win all the three categories, but in the last weeks of the challenge the author made some changes to the robot and performances fell down. This was caused by a some kind of bug that appears when the simulator runs at low speed. This is the reason why this month Fish didn't reach the requested limit to remain in the arena, but it's not a problem because BingleFish (the author of Fish) is also co-author of KillerBees, the best bot ever written for Jrobots. Its results were improved by the real time speed of the simulator and now it's more difficult than before to beat it. Yes, it's a hard life :)

In the last week some new robots were uploaded. They didn't reach the limit necessary to validate their results, but the next challenge is near and soon they'll show all their value (if they have any).

Now you can upload your robots to win the April 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees Forever 2 - The Revenge.

Final Results

KillerBees won all the three categories for the third time in the history of Jrobots. This is not a novelty :)

Marvin3 was uploaded too late in the January Challenge, but now it has the possibility to reach the third place in Double play. It's still a sin its weakness in Team Matches.

The two new robots of this month were Grunt and Dragon. I think that Grunt was the weakest robot ever seen in the arena (apart a Rabbit uploaded for mistake last year). It's the only robot that didn't reach the 50%-50%-25% limit this month.
Dragon is still under development and this explains its poor results in Double and Team play, but it's an improvement respect my old series. As you can notice my Platoon, Phalanx, Stinger and Sharks are now the last four robots in Single play, this means that it's time to choose a new movement pattern as Dragon does.

Now you can upload your robots to win the March 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees Forever. Yes, I think that no one is going to beat KillerBees for a long time. It's really the state of the art in the Jrobots programming technology!
The speed of the simulations of the new challenge will run in real time to leave more think time to the robots. The smartest robots will be favoured and I hope to see some changes in the result.

Final Results

For the second time in the history of Jrobots a single robot won all the three categories: it's KillerBees again!

Still great are the veterans Epa1 and Pulse1, but they had no chance because thay failed to beat KillerBees even in the previous challenge.
A new entry is Marvin3: the author uploaded it in the last week and its placements are not valid, but it'll start the next challenge from the beginning so it has good chances in Single and Double Matches. It's a sin its weakness in Team Matches.

Some historycal robots were removed because they didn't reach the 50% victories-matches limit. This means that most of the robots are top-notch robots and challenges are more selective.

Now you can upload your robots to win the February 2001 Jrobots Challenge aka KillerBees vs The Rest of The World 2^nd Chance in honour of the second great result of KillerBees.