During the April challenge the number of matches among cadets was very large, but this month happened again to have a poor number of matches (a total of 1721 for all the three categories). Thus the cadets' results can't be accepted. Let's see if the positive trend of interesting matches among cadets will continue during the next tournament.

On the veterans' side, more good news. First of all, StrangeMatter won the team category with a 4% gap. However Tango won both the single and double categories and StrangeMatter was second. Is a triple victory of StrangeMatter going to come? Let's see.
Another good news is that 5 out of 29 cadets promoted in April succeeded to survive. They are: CounterStrike, DarkSoldier, ELECTRON, the good old Jimbo and, very surprisingly, my weak Dragon. Probably the large number of promoted cadets made easier to survive among the veterans, thus hard days are coming for those five survivors.
The demoted jrobots are Leech, GenuineA, Genuine, Platoon, NeoBot, AronsRobot01, DarkDestroyer, Phalanx, Battlemage, Touche, Shark, NumeroOtto, Yoda, Stinger, Ender, Ciaky, Vampire, DirtyCoward, MaudDib, MarukoV4, Snutteplutt, RauaRoobert, DeadDuck, Earthworm. The other survivors (those five apart) are GulleFjun, FlameBall, Mouth, Bohan, KillerBees, Hellfire, DOOM, Stately, Headhunter, Starkle, IonStorm, StrangeMatter, Tango.

Now you can upload your jrobots to win the June 2006 JROBOTS Challenge (June 3^rd-24^th 2006) aka The Retreat of the 24!

The May Challenge ends now but the official results will be availableas usual in a few days, please be patient!
The next tournament is the June 2006 JROBOTS Challenge (June 3^rd-24^th 2006)

The May Challenge starts NOW!.
Upload your jrobots to win the May 2006 JROBOTS Challenge (May 6^th-27^th 2006) aka The Charge of the 29!
Remember that you can send your robots even during the challenge, so you're never too late. To read the results in real-time simply visit the Veterans' Battle Applet page or the Cadets' Battle Applet page.

• Thanks to GregM and Angsuman are now available two new tutorials in the Tutorials page.
  The first presents some pseudocode that helps cadets to lay down the algorithms of their jrobots. The code is commented with clear explanations.
  The second revels the source of the shortest effective jrobot ever written. The few lines of code demostrate that even simple ideas can build up competitive jrobots.

• During the challenge of this month the number of matches especially among cadets was very large. We got 5793 matches in the veterans league and 9794 matches in the cadetes league: I must thank all the players that donated their CPU time to make this competition very interesting. In fact, none of the cadets was promoted during the March challenge because of the low number of matches played, but now the large number of new players and new jrobots favoured a close competition and reliable final results.

  Among the veterans, the ususal great result of Tango apart, there was an exploit of StrangeMatter; in fact, togheter with Starkle and IonStorm, its position in the list is stable and the achieved parcentages are very high. Caos, the author of Tango has provided an overall performance graph that keeps into account the results of the three categories. The results he got is the following (click to enlarge):

  
  As you can see, the first place is undoubtly possessed by Tango with almost the 80%, then follows a very distinct StrangeMatter with more than 70%, and then two very near IonStorm and Starkle with more than 60%. Finally, it follows a plateau above 40% from DOOM to KillerBees made of the jrobots that usually confirm thenselves as veterans and another plateau above 30% made of jrobots that usually bounce back and forth from veterans to cadets.
  To summarize, the jrobots that survived in the veterans league are: GulleFjun. FlameBall, Mouth, KillerBees, Bohan, HellFire, Stately, DOOM, Headhunter, IonStorm, StrangeMatter, Starkle, Tango. The first four survived thanks to their results in team category.
  The jrobots demoted to cadets are: Berserk, Ladybug, 845bytes, Bosozoku, Shrike, Kraft, Teddybear, Janeway, RoboOlm, Bizarro.

  Among the cadets the large number of matches gave interesting results. First of all, a lot of jrobots deserved a promotion because they reach the required 50% in at least one category. A special mention to DarkSoldier, CounterStrike, Jimbo, ELECTRON, Snutteplutt, that placed in the first three positions, but also to Earthworm, a brand-new jrobots that is going to be promoted at its first appearance!
  I can notice that to survive among the cadets is sufficient an acceptable performance is single category, but to be promoted are necessary acceptable performances in team category, so a suggestion for novices is to improve the behavior in double and team category.
  A lot of brand-new jrobots were uploaded, but only Earthworm succeeded in the enterprise of being promoted at the very first appearance. The results are the following.
  Promoted: Leech, Genuine, DirtyCoward, GenuineA, Platoon, Touche, NeoBot, Shark, RauaRoobert, Stinger, Battlemage, DarkDestroyer, NumeroOtto, AronsRobot01, Phalanx, Yoda, Ender, ELECTRON, MaudDib, MarukoV4, Snutteplutt, Vampire, Ciaky, Jimbo, DeadDuck, Dragon, Earthworm, DarkSoldier, Counterstrike.
  Survived: Joyal, DarkDestoyerV04, DirkGently, Sprate, GipStrict, AlessioV3, Shank, Jwpazz, GiovyVbis, Worm, sprayer, Jwpazz2, GipLarge, Gip, Ajax, FoxSierra.
  Removed: Evan, Wombat, belva, Satellite.
  There are 29 jrobots promoted. Let's see what is going to happen in a very crowdy veterans league during the next challenge.

  Now you can upload your jrobots to win the May 2006 JROBOTS Challenge (May 6^th-27^th 2006) aka The Charge of the 29!