As you can see in the Battle Applet page, there is a new version of the arena with the Bubble-sort mechanism of match selection named Near mode (vs Rnd mode). You can download the new SDK (2.4) with the modified offline applet from the downloads page, so you can check yourself the new selection rule. This new selection rule is also available on the server and I hope to end the test period before the beginning of the new challenge. Try the new SDK and send me your comments.

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. The modified applet is not available yet in the SDK but I'm going to post the new version 2.4 in a few days (two new SDK in a week - another incredible event ;-> ).

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) .

The robots fought a total amount of 4560 battles (only). To see the results read the Challenges page.

Here is an abstract:

Single Winner	IonStorm	by Zeke	90.27%
Double Winner	KillerBees	by MontyFish	88.28%
Team Winner	KillerBees	by MontyFish	62.92%

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

1. First of all, there is a new collection of API proposed by Christo Fogelberg (that provided the suggestions and the code). He wrote a class to perform vector calculations and I've added it to the basic SDK. Since I must still test this extension, it's already available for your robots on the server but I've not integrated it in the documentation yet. You can read the Christo's original specification and download the source code and the updated SDK file from the downloads page.
   This episode teaches us that if someone has any ideas about the improvement of Jrobots, he/she can submit his/her ideas (with the implementation) and his/her dreams become true ;-)
   Feel free to send your ideas to the author of Jrobots or to the mailing list (in the latter case, be sure your ideas are REALLY GOOD and keep your message short).
2. Finally, if you download the latest SDK (2.2) you'll get also the new arena. Don't expect too much: It's always the old one but with a lighter look. If you run it as an application, you can save the test results on your hard-disk. There is also a new check-box to run automatically the test matches one after the other. Remember that the source code is available for free (obviously), so you can make all the changes you want to your personal JRobots arena.

Waiting for the end of the November 2001 Jrobots Challenge, tune your robots for the 2001 Jrobots Finals: it's going to be a hard fight!