[HN Gopher] Robocode
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Robocode
Author : kaycebasques
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-02-18 00:33 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (robocode.sourceforge.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (robocode.sourceforge.io)
| pryelluw wrote:
| I remember using this back in 2004-ish. The web was much
| different back then. Finding a robots game that allowed you to
| program your own tank was awesome. This is what got me into
| building my own sumo robots.
| kbouck wrote:
| Back in the 80's there was CROBOTS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots
|
| https://github.com/troglobit/crobots
|
| https://tpoindex.github.io/crobots/
| tpoindex wrote:
| And in the 70's, RobotWar:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar
|
| I created CRobots as a loosely based clone with a C based
| language, lovingly inspired by RobotWar. I believe there were
| predecessors even to RobotWar.
| contingencies wrote:
| Wow, HN is so great. Thanks for creating _crobots_! It was
| briefly very popular at my school in Sydney, Australia in the
| mid 1990s. Some of the then high school student programmers
| went on to do OS research (SEL4) and at least one joined a
| kernel team at Apple. I myself recently (10 years ago) veered
| from software to robotics, possibly subconsciously emboldened
| by _crobots_.
|
| If you are up to it can I suggest recording an audio
| interview with the Oral History team at
| https://computerhistory.org/contact-us/ about your life?
| flir wrote:
| I didn't know there was anything that predated Core War
| (1984). Cool, thanks.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Played this back in the day
|
| It's neat how teens & amateurs will reinvent classic techniques
| -- e.g. there was a technique in the community known as "dynamic
| clustering" which was really just K-nearest neighbor, but
| presumably whoever named it dynamic clustering had reinvented it
| from first principles and wasn't aware
|
| Looks like the robowiki includes this tidbit now:
|
| > Dynamic clustering is a technique to find entries in your log
| similar to the current situation. Essentially, it is a K-nearest
| neighbor algorithm, and not actually clustering at all. Despite
| this misnomer, the term "Dynamic Clustering" has stuck with the
| Robocode community.
|
| https://robowiki.net/wiki/Dynamic_Clustering
| krackers wrote:
| This seems to be the current champ:
| https://robowiki.net/wiki/BeepBoop
|
| Looking through past winners, it's fascinating how the strategies
| have evolved over time. I wonder if computation constraints were
| removed, you could do some sort of self-play RL to "evolve" some
| godlike strategy that dominates everything else
| flir wrote:
| Most likely you'd get stuck on a local maximum. Or rather, you
| couldn't prove you _weren 't_ stuck on a local maximum. It's
| still very cool, though. Lisp is a preferred language for this
| because of the whole code-as-data thing.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I am glad to see this is still alive. Can anyone speak to the
| state of the community in 2025?
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Robocode Tank Royale_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31632801 - June 2022 (52
| comments)
|
| _Robocode: A Java Programming game (2001)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25011515 - Nov 2020 (1
| comment)
| scrumper wrote:
| I enjoyed this a lot while consulting in Chicago in the winter of
| 2002. Good clean fun alone in a hotel room while the snow raged,
| though I don't remember winning much. I'm tempted to dive back in
| but don't really fancy dealing with Java again.
| petercooper wrote:
| I once ran a regional meetup with this as the activity. Walked
| through how to build the bots, how it all ran, and let people
| have a go at building their own.
|
| After an hour or two, we ran a series of rounds to see whose bot
| would win. The grand winner? A guy who had no idea to code, so we
| asked him how he did it. It turned out he just took one of the
| standard bots and changed a string to rename it.
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