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This was a solo project done for the school’s Robocode Tournament.
It was made in Java using the Robocode API in about a week and a half.
It won the two tournaments: 1v1 and team death-match (paired with Joseph Winter’s robot), which then made it win the award for Best Robot in the AI Class.
The name of the Robot is “IEatPonies”.
This was the official description given for the Robot:
IEatPonies is a robot that moves in circles, shoots at the nearest enemy and, when fighting 1v1, it rams into the enemy if they are close enough.
This project was helpful in learning programmable behaviours. At first, the robot was programmed to chase enemies and try ramming into them. However, later, it was noticed that many enemies were programmed to run away from enemies that are close.
So, the robot had its first change: it would only run into enemies when they were close.
This meant that the robot had to find a new way to move while enemies were far away, so, we started with a simple “back and forth” movement (oscillating). This caused a problem, since the robot usually hit walls. When trying to fix this, accidentally,circular movement was created. This gave better results than the oscillating movement, so it was kept.
The next main change done on the robot was that the ramming should only be done when fighting a 1v1. The reason was that, otherwise, a lot of energy was wasted.