Anshee

Just saw this name on the uploaders list for the rumble....welcome to the wiki, and introduce youself! -- Skilgannon

• Um... should this page be named "Banshee", not "Anshee"? -- AaronR
• I was just wondering that - the bot package is "banshee", but the [uploader's list] says "Anshee"... Anyway, whenever he/she introduces him/herself, I can rename the page if necessary. =) -- Voidious
• Maybe his/her first initial is "B"? -- AaronR

I started off with a very simple bot (banshee.mini.Nexus6), dusting off my math skills in the development process (who would think one forgets trigonometry so fast...?). The important thing is the rule I imposed on self at the beginning of development: I don't peek into others' code (or at least at the very minimum...), I want to implement all basic to intermediate stuff: (from linear, circular guns, to 'prediction' systems: surfing or bullet avoidance in general, targeting based on statistical analysis) all by myself. Only after that phase I'll look for others' ideas to stea^Wborrow :-)

This approach, I believe, will give me most fun while robocoding. On the other hand though, this probably greatly delays the moment my bots will pose any serious threat, but that's something my ego can live with for a while :-) But don't taunt me, please, if my next few releases keep hanging around 400 ;-)

Cheers and thanks for the welcome! :-) -- Anshee

Anytime. =) Here's a couple things I'd like to point out:

1. You don't have to sign your posts with the date. The wiki logs all changes automatically.
2. LinearTargeting, CircularTargeting, RandomMovement, and PatternMatching are all easy to implement without stea^Wborrowing anyone's code. However, when you get up to the level of GuessFactorTargeting and WaveSurfing, definitely consider looking at the tutorials. I know I never would have gotten anywhere with Horizon without the WaveSurfing tutorial and BasicSurfer.

Again, welcome! =)

Edit: One more thing - if you change your name in the [Preferences] page, it will appear on the Changes log and the View other revisions page.

-- AaronR

Welcome! Don't be afraid to be 'slow' on improvements. It took me two-and-a-half years before I earned the membership of the prestigious The2000Club. Learning it like I did makes you keen of little details that get more important once you rise in the rankings. -- GrubbmGait

I first learned of Robocode from a friend who also said that once he started looking at other peoples' code, all the fun went away. I started coding Ugluk in .. (checks the source code backup for Ugluk v0.0.1) October 2nd, 2005. So two years now, though I take breaks on occasion. The highest I've reached ratings wise is ~1840, but it's 100% me. If not, it wouldn't really be mine. -- Martin / Ugluk

Welcome to the wiki! It seems everybody brings their own style as to how they most enjoy Robocode. As for me, I am an advocate of OpenSource code (and all of my bots are), but I also find myself far less likely to peek at competitors' code as time goes on. I sort of see Robocode as a similar field to mathematics - few (if any?) mathematicians can become experts without studying the work of those who came before. I also think it's a great idea to start with more basic methods before working up to WaveSurfing and statistical targeting methods; sometimes I look back at the time when I was working my way through the early stuff as almost more fun than anything since. In any case, enjoy and feel free to ask questions. Cheers, -- Voidious

Hey, welcome, don't worry if your botstart out low! We've all been there in the 1400's (well most), I mainly do independent research into strange ideas, only a few have payed off. My best bot is buggy-ish. --Chase-san

@AaronR: Yeah, I know, I just wanted to set a clearly visible timeline to the discussion. IMHO wikis, while great for collaborative development of single-themed pages (wikipedia, c2) are a disaster for tracking any kind of more advanced discussion (for similar reasons like forums and blogs by the way). I still prefer Usenet for that, but it might be just me :-)

@Grubbm: You relaxed me a bit with this 2.5 years remark :-) It's a hobby afterall, after a workweek it's really refreshing to switch to 'ready when it's ready' approach (yes, I use Debian ;-)) By the way, your gh.mini.GrubbmOne was one of the first bots I compared against, with, errr, less than so-so results. As it turned out it's one of the most problematic opponents for Nexus6 :-) That's because Nexus is extremely vulnerable against bots that have circular targeting (like GOne, right?) and, at the same time, which movement cause Nexus to stabilize in near-circular ellipses, I guess.

• Hooray! Another Linux user =). Posting from Gutsy Gibbon... -- Skilgannon

@Martin: Yeah, same here: every line of _my_ code has to be _my_ way: I must know in detail what it does and why it's there. I think that's just a programmers' thing: they are control freaks about their work :-)

@Voidious: Your're absolutely right about experts having to know what'd been done in their field before. That's why when I'm about to become one (;-)) I'll certainly look for more direct inspiration. But that's a long to Tipperary :-) And about OpenSource: in short: me too. I just didn't want to come out pathetic attaching a license to something so simple as Nexus6 (source files are included in the jar anyway). BTW, is it customary here? ie. that bots carry a certain license?

• A lot of us (myself included) use the RWPCL. Some people use other ones, like the GPL, the KawigiPublicLicense, or the RWLPCL, some just release it with no license, and others just attach a small note, like "please share improvements" or "don't just copy my whole bot and tweak it". -- Voidious

@Chase-san: About experimenting: That's the one more reason for robocoding for me: It might give me opportunity to check out some ideas I've been thinking about since studies but never really had practical motivation to implement. This is mainly stuff connected with classification systems: rough sets, rules extraction, various data discretization methods... We'll see if manage to go so far :-)

-- Anshee