John Cleland

Hi all. I am a programmer and wannabe science geek from Auckland, New Zealand. I first stumbled across robocode 5 years ago, started building a bot, then forgot all about it until I saw a link and downloaded 1.5.0 a few months ago. Like [Eric Simonton] (top bots Eric) I decided to start at the bottom and work my way up to the big leagues. So far I have written Nano and micro bots. Next I am going to make the jump to mega as I need some space to try out the ideas that I couldn't fit into the small bots and I am sick of squeezing everything and not being able to structure the code the way I like due to size constraints. Though I hope the experience has lent me some discipline and good testing and benchmarking habits so my mega bot doesn't get bloated and innefficient.

Arriving late (this second time around) on the robocode scene is both easier and harder. Easier because there is so much good information, discussion and ideas in the wiki and so many good open source bots to draw example, ideas and inspiration from. Harder because the bar is already so hign and som many good ideas have already been well implemented that is very hard to do anything that is original or better. I have had many seemingly good ideas fail the acid test of combat and many other good ideas prove to be unoriginal when I later discover another bot that has already been there and done that. In the end most of my work has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Thanks to all the robocode community.

John

Nano Bots: The Neophyte series.

Micro Bots: The Hedgehog series.