PrairieWolf

By David McCoy. This is a very advanced robot, with a smorgasbord of techniques to choose from. And it does. PrairieWolf learns about its enemies. And keeps record of those informations, so even if it was weeks since your bot was up against PrairieWolf, he will remember. While most robots I have checked out have source code included, PrairieWolf has not. David has even obfuscated the Java byte code so peeking at class names or disassembly of the byte code won't tell you anything (not that I have tried the latter, it's a guess). But David does not keep all info about his bot secret. Far from it. It even has a loaded home page of it's own at:

https://www.geocities.com/evilsimon/PrairieWolf/prairiewolf.html

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This is one impressive bot! It hasn't been updated for ages and ages. Still it gives even the mighty DT a fight. Something that none of my bots have done since DT 1.61. The Robocode community really lacks the active participation of David McCoy?. I think he would have been able to push all kinds of limits to current robocoding. I have let myself be inspired by PW in the development of Swiffer. There are possibilities to explore with multi-mode stuff. -- PEZ

Wow. This was an early benchmark-bot in the development of Dookious, but I haven't looked at it in a while. Working on 0.71, I've got Dookious doing much better against many of his ProblemBots... but he's getting his butt royally kicked by PrairieWolf. I may end up taking a loss to him in my efforts to reach The2000Club! -- Voidious

I might be upset about it if this last version didn't go so well otherwise... But since it did go well, it's kind of cool that PrairieWolf is one of six losses for Dookious 0.791. Very impressive! -- Voidious

You just need to work on your gun. PrairieWolf is impressive indeed. Work with your gun until you don't risk losing against it and you will probably have improved your ranking even more. -- PEZ

It's funny how things work. A change that clearly bolsters my TC scores is to wait until my gun is turned. So I tested against PrairieWolf, since he beat Dookious 0.791. And I realized that after a few rounds, Dookious would never fire, because PW would get into his "vibrating" movement mode that alternates between -1.0 and 1.0 velocity; Dookious keeps trying to fire ahead of him every tick, and the gun never catches up. If PW hadn't beaten 0.791, I probably wouldn't have noticed this possibility before pushing this change out... -- Voidious