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Announcing the Seventeenth Official International RoboWar Tournament!

Who, What, Where, and When

Any entries sent to Eric Foley via email MUST be submitted in BinHex format. The robots must either be in raw BinHex or in MIME-encoded BinHex. If you do not send them in BinHex, the judges will be able to do absolutely nothing with the robots, and they will not be able to participate in the tournament. (To those of you who had troubles getting them to me last time, I've solved most of the troubles I had dealing with MIME last time, so I should be able to accomodate a wider range of submission formats.)

The Rules

Tournament Categories

Prizes will be given for first, second, and third place. The mortal round will be run with the official tournament facility set on aggressive scoring and official rules, with 9 maximum hardware points.

In the titan round, all the gloves come off. Every robot is allowed to have all the hardware they can legally assign to a robot under the hardware store. In the Sixteenth Tournament, B-ko's defaced cousin Mar proved that neo-physics would not open the door as easily to exploitation by wild new tactics as some might have thought, controlling the crowds and coolly holding off the offensives of her enemies effectively. Perhaps more telling, Mar also demonstrated that true titans that are designed as such are still superior to mere "heavy mortals" that just slap titanic hardware on a design that was originally intended for the lower realms. How warriors will continue to stretch the envelope remains to be seen.

Prize will be given for first and second place. The tournament will be run with the only hardware limits being what you can arm your robot by constructing it completely from scratch using only the Hardware Store in RoboWar 4.5.

Prize will be given for first place only, unless competition picks up to a point where there are more teams than titans entered. This tournament will be run with aggressive scoring and official rules.

Eric's own robots will be ineligible for this prize due to obvious conflict of interest.

The State of Affairs

The answer, RoboWarrior, is yours to give.

So summon up your mightiest robotic creations to do battle in a great conflagration of steel and silicon! Have no fear if you have entered no tournaments before: all of the tournaments but two had an entry fight its way into the Hall of Fame from the foundries of a first-time participant! So step forward, and know no trepidation! The ranks of RoboMasters are always being added to with new victors.

The Baseline Rules

• No Friends, No Prisoners. No robot, for any reason, may make any special friendly allowance for any other robot in the arena with it unless that other robot is paired with it in the team competition. All robots must treat all non-teammate robots as enemies and fight with them to the best of their ability in all arenas. (No pacifists, no voluntary shutdowns to benefit your buddies, no hordes, no exceptions.)

• No Exploitation of Bugs. All robots must fight one another within the reasonably-understood intended features of the game. Any robot that exploits a bug in order to gain an advantage will be disqualified immediately without refunding any entry fees. This rule has usually been considered a "goes without saying" maxim, but there were some misunderstandings last time concerning a particularly catastrophic bug in RoboWar 4.2.1, so it is going to be made clear this time around.

• Functional Distinctness. All robots or teams that are entered in any one category by the same author must be functionally distinct. The standard of functional distinctness is "the judges must be able to tell the difference in all robots' behaviors without having to pull out a disassembler or closely examining the robots' source code." Any noticeable difference that can be found in any of the robots' functions solely by watching them in the arena will suffice. Note: it is behavior which must be distinct, not merely their hardware. Hardware tweaks will not establish functional distinctness unless the judge's eye can pick out a change of their behavior as a result of this change (e.g. if they use different weaponry, they're functionally distinct, but if one just traded a hardware point of energy for armor, they're not).

  With the removal of entry fees, the standard will be a little more strict than it was before. In previous tournaments, I was willing to let mixing up identical solo and group modes between different bots by the same author slide more, such that you could enter any number of combinations of the same solo and the same group mode so long as at least one mode was distinct from all your other entries. This time around, I'm going to ask that there be something completely distinct about each robot rather than allowing this to extremes. I will emphasize distinctness more in the solo modes than I will in the group modes (i.e. I will take a more dim view of an identical solo mode being tacked onto several different group modes than I will of several different solo modes being tacked onto an identical group mode). However, people have gone by the spirit enough of what I want from functional distinctness that I doubt I'm going to have to explain the finer points of what I have in mind here. In general, please make sure that your entries in any one category are individually different.

• Plagiarism. Plagarizing code from other robots without express permission of the author is unethical and illegal. This should be completely obvious, but unfortunately, Matt Wellstein has stolen robots wholesale with no mention of the original authors. As he has not apologized for their actions, he is hereby entered in the RoboWar Hall of Shame. We're programmers, not lawyers, so please behave ethically.

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