April 30th 2003
You can read the April 2003 JROBOTS Challenge Results at the Contests page.
During this tournament IonStorm broke another record: For the first time a jrobot won the 80% of the matches in all the 3 categories!
An 80% percentage was not a surprise especially in the early days of JROBOTS. I can remember victory/matches percentages of 95% or more in single and double mode, but no one won 4 matches over 5 in team mode yet. IonStorm did it!
This was a strange tournament even for another reason: During the first weeks a strange bug prevent the tournament applet to work correctly in team mode. This explains why there are so few matches played this time. I hope that the problem is now solved and I'm curious to see the IonStorm's exploit repeated on a larger number of matches. A fact is clear: IonStorm's behaviour in team play is the most effective ever seen since the beginning of the JROBOTS tournaments three years ago. I must still analyze it in detail, but it is very interesting. I must thank Zeke for his creature.
Other thanks goes to Zeke because he published his own offline-arena, full of useful data on what's going on during the matches. It's a "must" for all the players who want to analyze the behaviour of their jrobots in the testing-phase: You can find it in the "files" section of the javajousters mailing list.
Percentages apart, the placing list shows no great surprises even this time. On the novice side, JerkyRobot, Cyp and DreamBOT didn't reach the requested percentages to survive. I hope that their authors will try to improve the effectiveness of their creatures. Some of them played so few matches that their real value is not very clear.
Now you can upload your jrobots to win the May 2003 JROBOTS Challenge (May 7th-28th 2003) aka IonStorm's Triple 80%!
April 9th 2003
The April 2003 JROBOTS Challenge starts now.
Remember that you can send your robots even in the course of the challenge, so you're never too late. The latest robots are stored in the file jjrobots_challengers.zip. You can download it to test off-line the behaviour of your robot against the other challengers. To read the results in real-time simply visit the Battle Applet page. Good luck!
April 1st 2003
The placing list shows no great surprises except the good percentages of KillerBees favoured by a lot of VOID jrobots uploaded during the challenge. IonStorm achieved another triple victory (S = 81.47%; D = 74.16%; T = 75.75%) and no one seems able to stop its long run to break the KillerBees' record. This time it reached almost a percentage of 80% in all the categories: 4 matches won every 5 matches played in single mode! 3 matches won every 4 matches played in double and team mode!
On the novice side, there were a lot of weak Rabbit-like robots. I didn't mean that when I said: "...IonStorm needs more cannon fodder for its missiles... will any novice accept the challenge?"
Fortunately, the novices Sverzellone and Cyp (the latter uploaded at the end of the challenge) seem above the average and their author may improve them.
So the new tournament will start with a clean arena and I hope that no more players will upload the jrobots of the SDK package. I have a long aged rule: Not to remove any jrobot from the arena during a challenge and I've broken it only one or two times in three years, but the players (I mean novices) must be fair. This is the reason why the next challenge is also known as "No More Rabbits!".
Remember also that your jrobot must be compiled with the "-target 1.1" option to generate a class file compatible with older JDKs and the JVM of the Internet Explorer. This request is specified at least on the uploads page and you are required to follow it, thank you!
Now you can upload your jrobots to win the April 2003 JROBOTS Challenge (April 9th-30th 2003) aka No More Rabbits!
