Robocode: Lessthan20charsyeah

Due to time constraints I shall skip right to the nitty-gritty:

Design

I wanted my robot to keep its distance while trying to track its opponent. Upon being hit with a bullet, it tries to avoid it by alternating movements. What resulted was something like a cross between Walls, Corners and MyFirstJuniorRobot. It scales the walls until its at a certain distance from the enemy, then it scans and tries to shoot at the enemy. If it gets hit by a robot, it turns inwards and travels far, and if it gets hit with a bullet, it tries to avoid it by zig-zagging or going further up the wall, depending on which stage its at.

Robots that Lessthan20charsyeah can regularly beat (in a test of 5 rounds)

- Corners (5/5)
- Crazy (5/5)
- Fire (5/5)
- MyFirstJuniorRobot(3/5)
- MyFirstRobot(4/5)
- RamFire(4/5)
- SpinBot(4/5)

Testing:

- Acceptance Testing:
My goal for the robot was to keep away from close robots and to dodge bullets. As such, I picked two robots to do acceptance testing on, Corners, since it picks a corner tracks a robot, and RamFire, since it tries to track and get as close as possible to the robot as possible. Lessthan20charsyeah has an acceptance rate of greater than 80% (more often than not it is 90%) which, in the my view, is sufficient enough for a competitive robot.

Behavior Testing

Due to time constraints I was able only to test the robot's ability to keep ones distance. I calculated the distance between the robot and RamFire for a typical battle. I tested to see if my robot was able to keep a distance of more than 200 for more than 70% of the time and it came out to be successful. Such, it does an acceptable job of keeping its distance.

What I learned:

I learned the importance of testing and documenting. More specifically, that no matter how imperfect a product is, it pays off to test often and test early. Testing takes up a lot of time and such one shouldn't try to fine tune a product and leave no time for testing. The documentation would be incomplete, giving the client less than perfect confidence in the correctness of the product.