Crusader

History

31/10-2004. version 0.1.6b rating 1956.82 922 battles
Movement: Removed the buggy try at a dynamic flattener.

31/10-2004. version 0.1.6 rating unknown
Movement: Fixed bug with the flattening, and some anti ramming added.
Gun: Huge bug corrected, playback of the movies was totally bugged. Also movie size increased and using MCsamples = Math.min( 100, movie.size * 0.1d ) ( creds to Axe ).

31/10-2004. version 0.1.5 rating 1930 659 battles
Movement: Introduced some flattening whenever i get hit more than 5% after round 5.

31/10-2004. version 0.1.4.4 rating 1943 830 battles
Gun: Some tweaks that I cant really remember, but best score so far.

31/10-2004. version 0.1.4 rating 1939 818 battles
Gun: Now with MultipleChoice. Sucha SlowBot :=[ , so it doesn't allow for a very long movie.

30/10-2004. version 0.1.3c rating 1909
Gun: Movie size increased and shouldnt disable itself now.

29/10-2004. version 0.1.3 rating 1913.96 684 battles
Gun: A new gun using PM signatures, inspired by Axe and ABC. Up next: MultipleChoice.

26/10-2004. version 0.1.2c rating 1907.28
Movement: Back to 0.1.1 and uses an unsegmented hitsArray if the current segment is empty.

24/10-2004. version 0.1.2b rating 1902.25
Movement: Now reduces dimension if the current one isn't well populated.

23/10-2004. version 0.1.1 rating 1909.84
Movement: Added some bin smoothing.

17/10-2004. version 0.1.0c rating 1893.08
Movement: Now calculates danger values based on bot width, better close combat evasion and moves towards the least hit of the reachable gf's.

17/10-2004. version 0.1.0a rating 1806
Movement: Totally rebuilt movement, should now be alot easier to test, debug and extend. This is a very early realease with some features yet to be implemented. Currently no dynamic segmentation, and no real flattening, only surfing the hits array.

11/10-2004. version 0.0.5 rating 1795
Movement: Added some more stat arrays. The movement should now hopefully be able to learn. Gun: Small tweaks, patternlength etc.

10/10-2004. version 0.0.4 rating 1743
Movement: Added an unsegmented stat array to the movement for faster learning.

10/10-2004. version 0.0.3 rating 1692
Movement: Fixed a lot of bugs in the movement, especially the predictors were improved alot. Also added some segmentation, currently using velocity, acceleration and distance.

09/10-2004. version 0.0.2 rating 1696
Movement: Made the movement data static and added the musashi trick.

08/10-2004. version 0.0.1 rating 1640
First release, pm gun and surfing under development, its all very buggy. Currently surfing only the closest wave and moves in the least dangerous direction.

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Author

trab

What's special about it?

My first attempt at making a competetive bot.

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

http://www.robocoderepository.com/BotDetail.jsp?id=2394

How does it move?

WaveSurfing.

How does it fire?

It uses a quite standard pm? gun that record velocity and deltaheading.

How does it dodge bullets?

WaveSurfing.

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

This is a 1v1 bot only.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

Between rounds it saves the recorded pattern and movement data.

Where did you get the name?

The British Crusader Mk1 Tank.

Can I use your code?

Sure, but hey its really messy.

What's next for your robot?

This bot is just an infant, so there's lots to come for it. Currently im concentrating on movement, im trying to make this bot into a true surfer. Later on i'm thinking of making a more advanced pm gun.

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Comments, questions, feedback:

I just looked at this bots RR@H performance some. I'm impressed at how fast you gota WaveSurfer working. Good work! I guess you must work some with your gun now. It's holding you back. -- PEZ

Thanks PEZ, i gotta credit you and all the other great coders on this wiki. Yea the gun isn't worth much, but there are still bugs in the movement that i would like to get rid of. Making a new gun is sucha project, especially since i would like to try my hand at an advanced patternmatcher such as ABC and Axe got. -- trab

There will always be bugs in your movement that you just have to clean out. Welcome to the swamp land of WaveSurfing. =) It sucks you down and refuses to let you work on your gun any. What kind of bugs do you still see you have? Maybe we can help you find a good path to fight them. -- PEZ

I know Crusader liked going kamikaze into BotA?'s bullets but now that my score is above 99.9 im not sure about the current situation. But what i do know is that Crusader sometimes get stuck oscillating in corners, but i guess thats more of an implementation thing than a bug. Lets see how 0.1.2 does, maybe i'll start working on a gun now that my movement is getting ok. -- trab

trab, since u are interested in more advanced PM, i strongly recommend that u take a look in MultipleChoice. ABC inspired me to use this a long time ago, I dont remember how much points it gave me, but iirc, it was a lot. I am currently refactoring my gun, and i´ll test it without MultipleChoice, but my guess is that i´ll lose a lot of points without it... -- Axe

Slow that MultipleChoice, right? Im curious to see how many pts it gives u... Btw: How many samples are u feeding MC with? I´m using 10% or 100 (the smaller from the two)... -- Axe

Yea, code speed has become a problem for my bot now that i got PM and MC, i really feel like doing everything over again, this time concentrating on code speed. 0.1.4 uses 40 samples for MC. Do you weigth the samples and if you do, how?

You may want to check out the WritingFastCode page. You probably don't need to start over, just rewrite the few lines inside of the loop that gets called the most. --David Alves

Well, a not-so-old description of my gun is in Musashi page... (only that i´m now using 20K last-scans & 100 MultipleChoices?, also the rating parameters are a lil changed now) To chose the 100 bests for MultipleChoice i rate them, and use these rates (1/rate) values when feeding the MultipleChoice. I also do a smoothing and shoot at best angle... -- Axe