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Feasibility of evolving a bot

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Lord Haart
2009-03-27
2012-09-15
  • Lord Haart

    Lord Haart - 2009-03-27

    Hi All,
    I'm in my final year of study, and I would like to use Robocode as a framework for implementing and comparing various learning algorithms (genetic, neural nets, learning classifiers etc). I've found a few existing research papers where Robocode was used, and it appears that it's quite user-friendly and straightforward enough that I can keep my focus on the actual algorithms I'm using, rather than tweaking the testing framework. I just wanted to get some opinions from you guys, the community, as to whether you think Robocode is suitable for something of this nature.

    A couple of other questions:
    - Support seems excellent, since there was a blog post not 2 days ago and an update the day before that. Would it be safe to assume that most of the bugs are ironed out, and the framework is mature enough to work on, or that there will be continued support?
    - Do I need permission to use Robocode? Naturally, I will not claim any of the existing code as my own, only the stuff I implement myself. Does the license mean that I need to make my code available too? (I have no issue with doing that, just need to be aware).

    Thanks! The project is incredibly promising, and should make a great testbed for students to learn Java & AI. Two Thumbs Up! :-)
    -Lord Haart

     
    • Lord Haart

      Lord Haart - 2009-03-29

      Thanks for the responses!

      I'm definitely liking Robocode, and I'll get started on using & posting on the wiki. :)

       
    • Nat Pavasant

      Nat Pavasant - 2009-03-29

      First of all, this is not community forum, you should visit robowiki (http://testwiki.roborumble.org/) instead.

      Answer:
      1) Almost all bugs is ironed out, I believed, because I'm tester. Actually, almost all non-beta version is stable enough, or at least the last version of each series (say 1.6.1.4 is last version of 1.6.1 series) and, Yes, it will continued supported. I believed robocode is part of Fnl (the main developer) life now, if he stop working on robocode, I confirmed that they will be another developer take over this project

      2) I think you don't need any permission, but it is good ideas to write articles about your work on the wiki so you can ask question to another robot authors. You don't need to make your code available if you want, but I (and possibly other author/developer, too) recommend you to make your source open so other author can read and learn from them. Some author is very experienced developer so they can help you to solves a bug or problem.

      Hope this will help you. The good of robocode in testing learning algorithm is there is many of good, hard-to-beat robots out there. But beware, almost all developers who touched robocode start being its addict, so you have been warned.

       
    • Flemming N. Larsen

      Hi, Nat is right.

      Whatever you code, belongs to you. The code you do in your robots belongs to you. The licence for Robocode does not cover that. :-)
      But if you make changes to the game itself, then the licence for Robocode applies, and it should be made available, if you distrubute your own version.

      Robocode has a very active community, and there is a lot of information/learnings to gain from this community - especially http://robowiki.net/

      Lot's of students and also AI researchers use Robocode to study AIs. :-)

       

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