Yes! oh, these memories... I may still have the sources of my bots around. Nasty algorithms with zone based tactics, opponent learning with neural nets, stochastic movement patterns, wheeesh.
We are still busy with new games, tron, kriegspiel and ludo are the next ones coming. Will ask the developers to look on robocode also. Thanks for the tip! :) If you have other nice games for AI, please let us know.
I'm the maintainer of LiteRumble [1], which is the official continual rankings of all Robocode bots. The Robocode install includes a client, which (offline) runs the battles that then get uploaded to the LiteRumble server, similar to SETI/Folding@home.
If you need anything on the Literumble which would help with an integration, don't hesitate the let me know. Discussion about developement of all Robocode related things happens on the RoboWiki [2].
I used to play RoboWar way back. This looks like a similar game. Did this replace RoboWar due to cross platform capabilities? I couldn't find any compare/contrast on the two systems. Anyone have any insight on whether they are related?
Robocode has bots written in real Java, and from what I see is more real-physics based. The graphics are more modern, and it is still actively maintained (although it is fairly mature now, bugs are still fixed in usually under a week). Also, in Robocode everybody gets the same capabilities, and everything is up to the AI you write.
What it really needs is a fresh infusion of people, although the barrier to entry for getting a bot in the top-10 is pretty high these days. Your best bet is probably trying for teams, twinduel or a codesize-limited melee bot.
Very cool. Thank you for the summary -- it does look interesting. I like the use of a real programming language and level playing field in terms of capabilities. It would be awesome if it could be made into an OpenAI gym environment. Although OpenAI is python, so there would probably be quite a bit of code to integrate them properly. I bet it would give a significant infusion.
http://robocode.sourceforge.net/