Sigterm

Author

Nathanael, and the rest of the Sigterm team (except the Documentation Manager). Names supressed for privacy issues.

What's special about it?

It's the fruits of a team project written for a unit at university.

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?

http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotDetail.jsp?id=2428

How competitive is it?

Ok. It's designed as a melee bot, but does ok in one on one. One of its competitors in the uni competition was Seth.

How does it move?

Antigravity with some variations. The gravity map is created with randomly placed gravity wells each round, with a gravity line on each wall. Each enemy robot is assigned a gravity well, as are bullets fired. Each gravity well can be assigned a direction (or nondirectional), polarity (attractive or repulsive) and various other parameters.

How does it fire?

Linear, circular, random and a broken pattern matcher. I don't know a lot about it - I didn't design that section.

How does it dodge bullets?

When a small (0.1<=x<=3.0) energy drop is detected in an enemy designated as one of the best targets, a bullet path using a linear algorithm is projected, and a moving gravity well assigned. If all goes according to theory, the robot will avoid the gravity wells assigned to bullets, and hence never be hit by linear targeting. Depending on which build you're using, Sigterm scores about 50 in the WaveSurfingChallenge without a wave surfing movement.

How does the melee strategy differ from one-on-one strategy?

No difference in strategy, except for scanning. There is a bug in one-on-one where the robot will scan and fire at a non-existent target, ie where an enemy robot isn't. But this doesn't occur in melee because the radar sweeps in melee to cover the whole battlefield, but only scans the enemy target in one-on-one. Sigterm's one-on-one score in RoboRumble would be better if this bug was fixed.

How does it select a target to attack/avoid in melee?

Sums various enemy parameters such as distance, energy and so on and picks the lowest few.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

It would save the enemy database if it wasn't for a bug in the Windows version of Java 1.4.2 which disabled our robot on startup, so we had to comment out calls that saved data. We should have just written and wrote to a static String class field, but you usually only think of these things after the competition...

Where did you get the name?

It's the UNIX "please die nicely" interprocess signal.

Can I use your code?

If you want, but I haven't released it just yet. When I get around to it or if public opinion demands it, then I will. But you must give credit to us.

What's next for your robot?

Nothing. I might fix bits and pieces if I feel like it later, but the unit competition is finished, so probably not for a while.