Hill size is limited to 25 entries each.
Coresize 8000 hills run with 100 rounds fixed sequence.
Coresize 800 evolved hill run with 250 rounds fixed sequence.
Coresize 8000 benchmarks use the Wilkies
benchmark run with 250 rounds
fixed sequence.
Coresize 800 benchmarks use the tinybm04 test set (available here), 1000 rounds
fixed sequence.
If you'd like a warrior added (or your warrior removed) send email
to
wtn90125@yahoo.com
Specify which hill(s). Multiple warriors in one email OK, if more than
a few zip/rar/etc them.
For reference, here is a evolved 800
hill
(benchmarks and listings) and
a evolved 8000 hill (benchmarks and listings) hills
based on the
top 20 evolved warriors on each of the Koenigstuhl
tiny and 94nop hills.
Procedures...
The evolved hills are for the output of evolving programs. No
hand-tweaking except for comments.
Hills are updated by adding all new entries (up to 10 warriors at a
time), running the hill batch,
deleting warriors below 25th place then re-running the hill batch again
to rank the surviving warriors. In other words the hill temporarily
grows to accommodate all new warriors, then is trimmed back to include
only the top 25 warriors.
In the event of a mistake a hill can be rolled back (erasing results
and code) if caught before the next battle, "kill" requests only remove
the warrior(s) on the current hill, leaving results and code in the
archives.
These are not automated hills, they're updated manually when I
receive entries or find something interesting to add. If a response is
desired indicate so in the email, it might take a day or so to update
the results (longer if I'm away).
Procedures are subject to change.
This is an informal "fun" thing, mostly for my own personal research
and amusement (so I've seeded the hills with warriors I selected from
published, publically available or my own warriors to beat up or get
beat up
by) but all are welcome to play by sending me warrior(s) or links to
warrior(s).
Hill files generated using the following batch files...
http://newton.freehostia.com/cw/testbats.txt
The report listings are just as the batch spits them out,
including truncating benchmark warrior names in the performance charts
(I widened the name field for the hill result charts showing who beat
who, but the benchmark reports use a shorter name format to fit within
80 characters).
The hill results files are
edited to look nicer and include the pmars command line and run date.
The above was last updated 5/24/10.
- Terry
Notes...
5/24/10 - Now that Maezumo is around, the mixed hill's previous
max-score rule of 130 Wilkies doesn't make much sense, need a new rule
- something like anything goes so long as it remains a mixed hill. Ran
the hill with a new entry along with M84a from the evolved 8000 hill.
7/9/09 - Maezumo has
been released. I played a couple of warriors I made with it while
testing on the evolved 8000 hill, very strong results! Maezumo is a
totally different kind of evolver that uses hints to automate the
production of scanner, paper and stone warriors. Not exactly a pure way
to evolve but loads of fun! The hints aren't simply a fixed
fill-in-the-blanks framework, rather they generate a wide variety of
warriors within each category using code that (sort of) emulates a
human coder's thought process, then uses a hill to select the strongest
warriors while running a more conventional evolver in parallel to
further mutate the warriors. This kind of changes things... pure
evolvers never were very strong for anything besides nano, requiring
separate evolved-only or strength-controlled hills to turn in a
half-decent showing for larger coresizes. Now they need to pump up the
strength to compete even on their own contrived hills.
5/13/09 - Restarting the notes - thoughts change as new ways of
doing things emerge that uncover potential issues in previous methods.
To recap - the goal is to find procedures designed to ensure that the
mixed hill for evolved and hand-coded warriors actually remains mixed.
The original idea was to use the Wilkies benchmark and let the
highest-scoring evolved warrior set the maximum permitted score on the
hill. Nice idea, since hand-coded warriors generally do better than an
equivalent-scoring evolved warrior. The issue was some evolved warriors
incorporate hand-written seed code and score quite well, simulations
suggested that if such warriors were permitted on the hill then the
hill could become almost completely hand-coded except for a couple of
exceptionally strong warriors. So the procedure was changed to permit
only "pure" evolved warriors to set the max. That didn't last long, the
issue becomes how to define what that means, purity is a matter of
opinion and there's no practical way to tell the difference between a
warrior evolved from hand-tuned code and one that arises purely from
chance. Then there's the "problem" of how to consider a warrior
produced by using pure evolution to re-evolve a warrior produced by a
framework-based redcode generator. Probably not pure, but after
hundreds of generations there might be little left of the original seed
warrior. Another general issue of having any hill warrior set the
maximum score is what to do if that warrior gets pushed from the hill.
So the original scheme was an interesting thought but not really
practical.
The strongest purely evolved warrior I know of (v4_260) scores 128
Wilkies, so the new procedure is to simply only permit warriors on the
mixed hill that score 130 Wilkies or less, as benchmarked by the stock
pmars program set to 250 rounds fixed sequence (-r 250 -f). Much
better... accomplishes the same thing but without ambiguity. Note that
this doesn't mean the hill will become composed of warriors scoring
only near the maximum, Wilkies performance does not determine hill
ranking! Right now the strongest-benching warrior on hill (Boom) scores
about 100 Wilkies, the current king of the hill benchmarks at 72
Wilkies, 2nd place gets 63 Wilkies, a scanner getting 18 Wilkies is
presently in 9th place, and evolved papers that score over 88 Wilkies
are near the bottom of the hill.
Performance of a warrior on a hill can be predicted using the TEST benchmark program and the current hill
contents - set TEST to coresize 8000, 100 rounds, fixed sequence, self
battles enabled. The resulting score numbers should closely correspond
with the posted hill scores. TEST is designed to benchmark a directory
of warriors against a benchmark set in another directory making it easy
to test several warriors at once to see which ones will do the best on
the hill. To determine Wilkies scores test using 250 rounds fixed
sequence, self battles disabled, using the Wilkies warriors as the
benchmark set. To exactly predict performance put the selected
warrior(s) in the same directory as the current hill warriors, run
hill8000.bat (from testbats.txt), rename or remove the warrior(s) past
25th place and rerun hill8000.bat. This is how I do it but other
methods can be used to achieve similar results. For a more
point-and-click experience CoreWin
can be used - set up the parameters (coresize 8000 etc), add all the
warriors to the list and run a "round-robin" tournament. Rounds should
be set to 100 rounds or more. CoreWin doesn't support fixed sequence so
the results will differ somewhat from what I come up with and will vary
from run to run, but should be fairly close.