In teams; a crappy AI bot is a disadvantage to the team - in FFA's, a crappy AI bot is an advantage to those near.

Quite right. People boot their neighbours in FFA games often enough if they are a single second over the time limit. Also in team games people sometimes boot members of the opposite team a little too eagerly.

On the other hand, no matter how elaborate a bot is made, I don't think they'll never compete with humans on the level that people would boot their teammates in order to get a bot to play for them instead. If people really don't want to have novice players in their team all they have to do is join a game with filters.

How about you first finish the AI Challenge and then we can brainstorm about how to make WL itself benefit from your results later? :)

If anything WL would benefit from Norman's results, not mine :D His bot never ceases to surprise me.

If anything WL would benefit from Norman's results, not mine :D His bot never ceases to surprise me.

From the top tier bots my bot is the worst at fighting especially in those situations where you start right next to your opponent. Basically my fighting algorithms still work the same than two weaks ago but the other bots are smarter now. At present I'm to bored to write some clean code there since that would require a complete rewrite of my fighting code (just as I did with the expansion code).

It's a mistake of most bots that they don't priorise expansion and fighting properly. If you manage to get the income advantage on this small map then I strongly disagree with keeping your expansion going. Finishing a bonus where only a couple spots are missing is probably fine but apart from that you should use your armies to finish the opponent off. On the other hand taking your fast bonuses should have top priority.

Well, I definitely think I made some progress on my bot this weekend :D

I was wondering: is it possible to retrieve the source code from a JAR file? if not, i think it would be nice if we put our bot as a JAR file here, so that we could run some games against eachother bots using Norman modifed engine

I think it's very possible to extract source from jar files with an utility like JD GUI.

http://jd.benow.ca/

When compiling from source code to object (executable) code, a large number of details about your program disappear. For instance, compiling the following code

    // Initialise the entire array
    for ( int i = 0; i < myArray.length; i++ )
    {
        myArray [ i ] = i;
    }

will result in object code which is identical to if you had compiled the following:

    for ( int x = 0; i < y.length; x++ )
    {
        y [ x ] = x;
    }

So yes, the structure can be recovered, but all your comments are gone and all (or most? not sure about the details of Java) variable names are gone. This makes it much harder to figure out what your code is doing and much, much harder to understand why it is doing so.

If you think your bot has a chance of performing well and you don't want to help your opponents, I'm sorry, but I'd advice against freely distributing the .jar file.

Of course, if there are some people you trust not to even attempt such reverse engineering and be careful enough not to share it with other people, you could always send a select group of people a private message (go to "Mail", right next to "Forum" in WL's menu bar) with a link to your .jar file. (Note I'm just giving options; judging people's trustworthiness is something you can only do yourself.)

it's not really for me, i don't really care about giving away my code (I even gave my code to another warlight player in the AI competition so that he could help me figure out what is wrong with it). It was more for other bot like Norman's, wich has been on top of the ladder for some time now, so i would understand if he didn't want his bot reverse engineered...

if someone wants to trade JAR files, just mail me

Edited 2014-04-14 01:57:17

I don't have any practical experience with this stuff but possible solutions imo:

- Use an obfuscator
- Turn the .jar file into an .exe file (should also work I think)

Fighting against other bots would be nice. During the weakend I changed my old fighting algorithms. Against the old version of my bot I only get 57% win rate since both versions have the same "basic thoughts". Playing against other bots however I finally reached the 2800 rating (as I write this post). You guys thought SupremeDalek was out of business? Well, guess again. I'm back again and stronger than ever. I was to bored and didn't have enough time to add code lately. But then you wannabes pushed me down to 5th place and I just couldn't let that insult slide.

hahaha yeah congratz on the 2800 rating. you want to trade JAR?

there are java decompilers (that extract .java from the .jar) and code prettifiers (that turn obfuscated code into readable code) available. it can be cumbersome but it can be analyzed. but all things considered it's much easier to look at the damn game and figure out what the bot is probably doing.

My favorite game so far:
http://theaigames.com/competitions/warlight-ai-challenge/games/534de8bd4b5ab2132e949ae8

Very interesting moves by pedrito turn 72 and 73. I wonder whether pedrito was watching SupremeDalek's deployment to find out if he was expanding and how much of the africa he already had.

yeah really interesting move, he watch supremdaleck's deployments for sure

So lucky at the end :) Bot knew he had Africa before he even deployed 8 guys the first time, I'm surprised myself.

I'm actually kind of surprised how well my bot is doing since he doesn't have any idea of where the enemy is or how much income he has / if he has a bonus. Yet he has beaten all the higher placed bots in one of the last games and keeps pending around the 7th place.

What I find very intresting is that none of the bots decides to take brazil earlier, which should be a top priority for both of them (and any decent wl player would proably have done). if you guys get to the level that the bot would take brazil earlier I'd be very impresed. Still it is impressive to figure out the opponent have africa whith no vision and before it deploys +8.

do you guys figured out how to retain state between runs? i've been trying to do that in order to access the state of the game from previous turn for advanced strategy, but the only way i found is through object serialization, wich we need writing access to do...wich we don't have

I don't think you're supposed to be able to do that... If memory serves there's a clause in the rules which says you can't base decisions on who you're fighting (in other words: having a line "if opponent = X then do-something else do-another-thing" in your code would not be allowed).

A sort-of way around that is to gather everything your bot has learned in "offline" testing and include that knowledge right into the source code. But with offline testing, you can only fight against opponents you have the code for. Except...

If your bot does not rely on randomisation anywhere (if it always plays exactly the same game if the opponent makes all of the same decisions) you could even feed it matches played on the server by having it play against a fake opponent which simply "plays back" the moves of an opponent in an interesting game. Note the bit above though; any knowledge you gain will be used against all opponents, including the ones with a completely different style!

actually i didn't mean retain state between games, i only need between rounds (the program runs every rounds right?), like here when we play warlight and check the "history". I would like to have access to the map, the opponent moves and my moves from previous rounds

125: just do an object array and stores all moves from all rounds as you parse them.

yes but since the bot runs every rounds, i can't initialize the array, because it is just going to start a new array every rounds right? and i can't add objects to an array i didn't initalized..

Edited 2014-04-19 16:58:36