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Graduate Capstone Project Breaking Walls: Developing a Successful Robot in Robocode Chris Velez cvelez4@pride.hofstra.edu Summer 2011 Advisor :Dr. Xiang Fu Committee Members: Dr. Habib Ammari, Dr. Chuck Liang 1

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Overview Introduction Problem Algorithm Design Performance Conclusion 2

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What is Robocode? Game where robots battle in an arena Robots are controlled via Java programs Battles consists of 10 rounds A battle ends when robot is destroyed 3

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Anatomy of a Robot 4

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The Problem Goal: Defeat the robotWalls Walls is the top performing robot Must create a robot to defeat Walls 5

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The WallsKiller Robot Contribution: Creation of WallsKiller WallsKiller defeats Walls in 1 on 1 combat. Maintains a high level of performance 6

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What Does WallsKiller do? Implements a firing algorithm developed to hit Walls Uses an erratic movement pattern to avoid enemy fire 7

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The Algorithm Takes advantages of Walls predictable movements Predicts the movements of the Walls robot Uses quadratic equations 8

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Walls Behavior 9

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The Cosine Rule Will utilize rule and apply to the positions of Walls and Wallskiller 10

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Applying Cosine Rule 11 Alpha Beta

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Design WallsKillerRobot BattleData FireControlSystem FireCommand QuadraticEqRoots 12

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WallsKillerRobot Base class Controls movement and firing commands Battle event handlers 14

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BattleData X,Y Coordinate data Distance, heading and bearing Enemy heading, bearing and velocity 15

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FireControlSystem Implements firing algorithm Calculates firing angle Passes information to FireCommand 16

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FireCommand Choose whether or not to fire Set power of bullets Determines degrees to rotate gun 17

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QuadraticEqRoots Implementes advanced mathematics Returns data to FireControlSystem 18

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Performance Hit Rate 70% Average Remaining Health: 77 Energy Robocode Score: 72% 19

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Observations Hit percentage under 100% Walls turning Improved evasion 20

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Conclusion Successful in 1-on-1 combat Performance shows room for improvement Needs improved movement algorithm 21

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References Mathew Nelson, "Robocode", available at http://robocode.sourceforge.net/, retrieved 06/01/2009. Parker S, Secrets from the Robocode Masters: Predictive Targeting, http://www.imb.com/developerworks/java/library/j-pred-targeting/ (2002) Eisenstein, J.: Evolving robocode tank fighters. Technical Report AIM- 2003-023, AI Lab, Massachuesetts Institute of Technology (2003) F.N. Larsend, Robocode Scoring Available: http://robowiki.net/wiki/Robocode/Scoring (2010) S.Li,Rockem sock em robocode!, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-robocode/ (2002) 22

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References cont. Shichel S, Ziserman E, Sipper M,: GP-Robocode: Using genetic programming to evolve robocode players. Ben-Gurion University, Department of Computer Science. Kobayashi K, Uchida Y, Wantabe K,: A study of Battle Stragety for Robocode. SIC Annual Conference, Fubuki University Japan (2003) J.L Nielson and B.F Jensen, Modern AI for Games: Robocode. http://www.jonnielson.net/RoboReportOfficial.pdf, (2010) J. Hong and S. Cho, Evolution of emergent behaviors for shooting game characters in Robocode, Evolutionary Computation, pp. 634- 638, 2004 23