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Evolving Robocode tanks for Evo Robocode

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Abstract

Evo Robocode is a competition where the challenge is to use evolutionary techniques to create a Java based controller for a simulated robot tank. The tank competes in a closed arena against other such tanks. The Robocode game is a programming platform that allows such tanks to compete. This article discusses the use of Grammatical Evolution (a form of genetic programming) together with spatial co-evolution. This system harnessed co-evolution to evolve relatively complex behaviours, within the program size constraints of the competition. The entry for the 2013 Evo Robocode competition was not evolved against any human coded robots and yet was able to compete effectively against many previously unseen opponents. The co-evolutionary system was then compared to a system that used a handcrafted fitness gradient consisting of pre-selected human coded robots. The top robots from the co-evolved system performed as well as those evolved using a hand crafted fitness function, scoring well against such robots in head to head battles.

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Notes

  1. http://robocode.sourceforge.net/.

  2. for example, http://robowiki.net/wiki/.

  3. http://robowiki.net/wiki/RoboRumble/Starting_With_RoboRumble.

  4. http://robowiki.net/wiki/Talk:Pattern_Matching.

  5. http://www.jonnielsen.net/RoboReportOfficial.pdf.

  6. The tracker robot is one of the starter robots provided with Robocode. It tracks its opponent, moving close and firing when possible.

  7. The terms hosts and parasite are as used in [5, 18] and are kept here for the sake of consistency, although in the case of this article, we perhaps more intuitively, have two teams, say team “A” and team “B” and the host is a member of team “A” while the parasite is a member of team “B”.

  8. Or conversely, when the hosts attempt to migrate to new nodes, they will meet parasites able to defeat their specialised behaviour.

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  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Robin Harper

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  1. Robin Harper
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Correspondence to Robin Harper.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

Table 3 Grammar used to evolve the non-terminal sentences
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Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Composition of the robot teams used to form the various fitness functions
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Harper, R. Evolving Robocode tanks for Evo Robocode. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 15, 403–431 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-014-9224-2

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