Please vote on these rules and explain your vote below. I think we should call these rules binding when at least 10 people have voted.
Should bots entered in the RoboRumble@Home be allowed to come preloaded with data?
Should bots entered in the RoboRumble@Home be allowed to come preloaded with more data than the Robocode client allows to be written?
Should we change the default limit (200K) on how much data Robocode allows to be written to #_RR_participants * 1000 bytes of data?
Thats what i had do: Run 297 battles with league (100 battles, then saved the data in versions dir, more 197 battles and saved them too), then packed the version (not much diff. than other similar processes like WT).
I have no intention of maintaining that version. Once done the test, i´ll recall it. The idea came when trying to reduce saving data for 300 bots into 200K... I realized that RC actualy doesn´t have any restriction of more than 200Kb in data dir, but only forbiden your bot to SAVE data beyond that limit.
There is absolutely no reason why data should not be pre-packaged with a bot. Any sort of config/properties file is an example of this.
In my mind ethical issues start to arise depending on the nature of the data. For example, if it is purely the normal data that a bot can calculate for itself and save, pre-packaging is not actually giving any advantage, it merely speeds up the learning curve of the bot. Presumably its rating would stabilise at the same level in the end. (My opinion would be different for a fixed-duration league however).
Although I personally prefer the idea of self-contained bots that learn for themselves from scratch every battle (in fact I've not written a bot yet that even stores any data between rounds!), bots exhibitng longer term learning seem quite an interesting area to explore as well. So far so good.
If however data is being stored that cannot be derived by the bot itself I start to seriously question it. i.e. if somebody wrote a bot that had an array of guns, but didn't have any means of its own such as virtual bullets and virtual hit/miss statistics to choose which was best against different targets, and hand-crafted a data file saying what gun to use against what specific named opponent, then I would have a problem with that approach. Not really any different to hard-coding enemy bot names into if statements in the code!
For the next version of robocode, could it be possible to display the codesize of the compiled bot within the compiled popup box? That would save me running a batch file every time I compile.