Re: Trying to stir conversation in the rrobots community

Hi Greg,

well there was some talk about new feature in february but all
in all you are right. This might be my fault, (at least part of)
I was planing tournaments on a regular basis but was distracted
by several - personaly more important - events.

But nevertheless, if there is increasing interest in a new
RRobots tournament we should realy be able to have one again.

I would suggest the following:

All who want to paticipate in the next tournament can send their
robots offlist (I will provide an email address if we decide to
follow these rules). I will run a one-on-one tournament of all
submissions every day (if there are new submissions) and post the
results to the ML. (this keeps the noise low on the ML and
everyone is able to see if there is further tweaking necessary)

The deadline for the last submissions would be 28-05-2006 so
everyone has time to code a real killer :slight_smile:
All submissions will be posted on the website allong with the
results for everyone to learn from.

After that I would suggest running a two-on-two team battle
tournament with same rules for another month.

Ok, everyone who wants a new tournament please speak up
(either here or in the rrobots forum
http://rubyforge.org/forum/?group_id=1109 )

Everyone who may help to improve the web site or would volunteer
to run the dayly matches should also contact me.

BTW: is there a way to place dynamic content on rubyforge hostet
sites? (maybe this is a stupid question, I just didn’t found it
yet)

cheers

Simon

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 19:03 +0900, Kroeger, Simon (ext) wrote:

BTW: is there a way to place dynamic content on rubyforge hostet
sites? (maybe this is a stupid question, I just didn’t found it
yet)

Nope, not yet… we’re trying to avoid that to help keep RubyForge nice
and snappy.

Yours,

Tom

On Apr 27, 2006, at 3:03 AM, Kroeger, Simon (ext) wrote:

But nevertheless, if there is increasing interest in a new
RRobots tournament we should realy be able to have one again.

Perhaps something that would be more maintainable would be to create
an on-going KOTH* server? This web application would allow anyone to
sign up and submit their robots. Uploaded robots are then run
against existing robots, and each robot gets its own ELO or Glicko-2
rating*.

That makes it so that anyone can sign up and start playing
immediately. This is how some of the old Redcode things used to run

  • way back in the day.

–Steve

  • KOTH == King of the Hill
  • I wrote BSD licensed Glicko-2 code, free for the asking

Hi Stephen,

that would be great without a doubt, but I’m not able to provide an
environment where i could run code from everyone and his dog and have
healthy sleep at the same time. $SAFE might be an approach but i think
i remember somebody mentioning thats not really safe. (am i wrong?)

At the moment it isn’t even reasonable save to assume that a robot did
not cheat without looking at the code - $SAFE might be fine to ensure
that, i just hadn’t had the time.

cheers

Simon

Simon,

No blame to take - the game is great and a nice challenge, but real
work always takes precedence.

Thanks for the offer of the tournament, I’d love to participate. Any
rules are ok with me, as this is all a learning experience for me.

Greg