Strategy guide: Experts

By Dennis C. Bemmann

To start with Adam and Eve (almost): quite often, you'll find that mankind has copied nature with technology (by purpose or inconsciously), because strategies that have stood a chance in the evolution are good in some way.

One domain in which RoboCom bots are adopting natural concepts, are (of course): virii. But I want to talk about something else:

Experts

The first bots were much simpler than modern bots. Despite some variations (MegaMorf) All the robots of a program were basically the same, that means: they were doing the same things and sharing the same code (DJContinuum). This concept can be quite successful: CopyBot dominated the charts for a long long time.

But think of BASIC - the programming language which can do everything, but nothing very well.

Different bots in one program

Today's successful programs usually work differently: several kinds of bots are specialized on doing subsequent tasks. One could say: there are expert bots. While some bots are specialized on taking as much space as possible, others are specialized on killing (mean, isn't it?)

Advice #1: Successful programs build many bots of different kinds.

When time passes...

It's obvious that you don't need flooders (fast spreading, board filling robots) in the second half of a game (because the board is already full). Like flooders, many expert strategies are only (or especially) efficient in a certain period of time during the game. You won't start building those large 20-bankers right at the start, because it take too much precious time when you only have few bots. However, after you have already survived 10000 cycles, you could give it a try. At this time, giants can do a good job in cleaning up the board.

Advice #2: The effectiveness of expert strategies is highly dependant on the game time.

Recycling

Don't use everything at once. A revolutionary bot (like CopyBot, FeinerSand, OuterLimits) is also Strikers. For the first time, this bot introduced the concept of flooders, which I developed in order to make a carpet for later distributing a quick-spreading virus that would be fast enough to infect the invlnerable-seeming CopyBot. Strikers succeeded. Besides that, Strikers is not only a program which uses expert bots, but it's also an insect. Like in nature, insects have different life phases. A butterfly is totally different from the worm-like caterpillar it used to be, but it's the same animal. Transferred to RoboCom: experts don't need to be destroyed if you don't need them anymore. Some of them can be reprogrammed to do a different task, if their architecture (number of banks, instruction set) allows this. Look at Strikers0.9 to see how flooders are transformed to cleaners.

Advice #3: you can recycle experts by reprogramming them to do a different task if their architecture fits.

Some terms

What kinds of experts are there? Well, I'll just tell you some commonly used names (and synonyms for the same) which are used for expert bots. For a more exact definition, look into the RoboCom Glossary).