An attempt to revive Robocode

[Billy Jones]

Hi everyone,

I am a longtime competitive programmer but have just recently discovered Robocode which is honestly way more fun than the generic competitions I am used to. However, I was surprised by the lack of active online competitions (besides https://literumble.appspot.com which I think is a great and generous contribution to the community).

After a bit of thinking and tinkering with the Robocode "CLI", I decided to build an Arena with a continously running ladder of robots. I have been experimenting with it for a month or so now and thought I'd share it with everyone here in case anybody is still Robocoding or wants to pick it up again.

I also figured it would be fun to see what the current LLMs are capable of when it comes to Robocode. So, I ran the following experiment https://robocode-arena.com/blog/ai-experiment which some of you may find interesting.

Thanks,
Billy

[fnl]

Hi Billy,

This sounds really interesting! 😊
Please also spread this on the Facebook group for Robocode: https://www.facebook.com/groups/129627130234

And also take a look at Robocode Tank Royale (new platform for Robocode):

https://github.com/robocode-dev/tank-royale
https://robocode.dev/

It would be great to have something like that for Robocode Tank Royale.

I am thinking on letting people share robots from git using a central git repo, where people must do a PR to add their bot so it is visible for others.
The PR is necessary to check for vulnerability and other security stuff, and we need moderation of the PRs.

I don't hope Robocode is dead because I will stop developing on the  Robocode Tank Royale, if that is the case.

Cheers,
- Flemming

[Billy Jones]

Thanks for the reply. I don't have a facebook account so I will ask a friend to post on there.

> It would be great to have something like that for Robocode Tank Royale.

I tried Tank Royale and I think Python support is key. If there is enough traction, I will be happy to run Tank Royale on the existing infra and set up a separate ladder.

> I am thinking on letting people share robots from git using a central git repo, where people must do a PR to add their bot so it is visible for others.
> The PR is necessary to check for vulnerability and other security stuff, and we need moderation of the PRs.

This is probably a lot of overhead for you (as a maintainer) and may also discourage some people from uploading robots becaue it will expose their strategies. For an online version (like the Arena) of Tank Royale, the security risk could be solved by running robots in separate VMs since it's built on WebSocket but this also means running the battles will be more resource intensive and a bit slower.

Billy

[Sergii Redchuk]

Hi Billy,

I've spent a few days recently building this https://github.com/SergiiRedchuk/roboclod then when I finished, I found this group and your post :-)

My AI experiment is different from yours though. Instead of chatting with AI using prompts I created agentic optimization loop where Claude Code reads the API and battle evaluation results, figures out code improvements itself, runs evaluators in headless mode again, compares new metrics with previous, promotes or reverts the changes, and suggests its next steps. Then rinse and repeat.

Here's a few slides showing what it does https://github.com/SergiiRedchuk/roboclod/blob/main/doc/RoboclodSlides.pdf

Enjoy :-)