Tournament X Results
July 28, 1995

Congratulations to all who entered the Tenth International RoboWar Tournament.  There were 38 individual entries and 11 teams from a total of 24 participants.  Entry fees were collected from all US entries and were optional on international entries (but required to be eligible for prizes).  A total of $128 was collected, making each winner receive a $16 prize.

Category	Winner	Robot(s)
Individual 1st	Jean-Francis Lechat	Jade
Individual 2nd	Doug Harris	*CL79*
Individual 3rd	Jean-Francis Lechat	Carne
Youth	Greg Parker	HappyBotª XXI nuke
Team	Colin Jaffe	Killer DogCow #1
		Killer DogCow #2
Icon Contest	Breg & Grian Parker	The PokeyMorph Team


For the third consecutive tournament, Jean-Francis Lechat has imposed continental domination on the RoboWar arena.  Will some cold Russian winter finally thwart this Napoleon of RoboWar in the Eleventh Tournament, or will Lechat continue his world domination indefinitely?  Jade is a souped-up version of Lechat's old standby, while Carne employs a hitherto unknown technique with tremendous success.  For the record, drones and lasers still do exist in RoboWar, but are seldom useful (Lechat demonstrates the first successful use of drones) and can only be enabled in a robot through ResEdit, an exercise left to the hacker.

Doug "Wolfgang" Harris and Greg Parker exploited loopholes in the rules to build suicidal destroyers that accumulated tremendous scores in individual combat by nuking all other robots into oblivion.  Unfortunately for these RoboWarriors, their individual routines were not as good as the other top bots and the suicidal destroyers weakened each other in the Winners' Circle, thus failing to take first place.  Doug Harris had already pioneered the suicidal destroyer tactic in team competition years ago and mercilessly jumped on the loophole when it resurfaced.    Needless to say, suicidal destroyers will not be viable in the Eleventh Tournament.  Incidentally, Doug's robot was nearly disqualified on the basis of obscene comments in his source code!

Colin Jaffe won the team event with his Killer DogCow pair.  Congratulate him with a loud "moof!"

After years of trying, the Parker Brothers achieved their coveted Icon Contest award with the ineffectual but cute PokeyMorph team animation.  The team seldom lives to show off, however; in the future, robots should stay alive long enough to be seen if they hope to be viable contenders in the Icon Contest.

None of the title screen entries were sufficiently interesting to replace the current RoboWar title screen.  If anyone has brilliant ideas for a new title screen and artistic talent to implement the ideas, drop me a copy and your work might be featured on the opening screen.

General Comments:

Overall, the quality of the entries to the Tenth Tournament was excellent.  The top robots are all world-class and very few robots fall into the category of pathetic. Furthermore, a large fraction of the entries came from experienced RoboWar hackers, including RoboMasters Abbott, Foley, Harris, Lechat, and Lindsey who all hold past RoboWar titles.  Congratulations to all the newcomers who valiantly struggled in the heated contest.

As a concession to the Religious Right, the Tenth International RoboWar Tournament was an official 1995 Sponsor of Family Values.  Families entering the tournament include brothers Ed and Matt Schenk, the father-daughter-son combination of John, Laura, and John Abbott (with son annihilating father in the arena, and Laura contributing icons), and the infamous Parker Brothers of Lost Nachos, CA.  Doug Harris may even count in the list of family members, despite his denial of any relation to this author.

This was the first tournament to use the new aggressive scoring rules and Eric Foley will be happy to conclude that the Pacifist Alliance is dead.  Combat is generally swift and violent now and only the tough and clever survive.

The Tenth Tournament was run on a PowerMac 8100 using RoboWar 4.1.1 with a few minor fixes.  Just over one million chronons were simulated in 41 minutes, for a throughput of 413 chronons / sec.  RoboWar 4.2 will likely be available later this year with many more fixes.  There is a known bug in RoboWar 4.1.1 involving projectile speeds changing for no apparent reason; however, this bug cannot be reproduced on my development machine and did not impact the tournament.  There is also a known bug that robots early in the roster seem to outperform those later in the roster; the tournament was biased in this way, but the bug hopefully will be corrected in later RoboWar releases.

The complete results of the tournament appear below.  Authors who declared themselves under the age of 18 are italicized to give special credit to the rising generation of RoboWarriors.  The results will be posted to the net (AOL, the major FTP sites, and the RoboWar Home Page at http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~harrisd/robowar.html) The entries are also available on disk, though sounds have been mercilessly deleted from the larger robots so that the complete results will fit on an 800K disk.




Individual Competition (note:  top six robots advance to the Winners' Circle)

Robot Name          Author          Solo Score  Group Score Total    WC Solo  WC Group Final    
Jade               J.F. Lechat	594         447         1041     280      179      1500     
*CL79*              Doug Harris	439         630         1069     156      207      1432     
Carne              J.F. Lechat	576         419         995      220      172      1387     
ArachnŽe 	      J.F. Lechat 	568         381         949      216      169      1334     
HappyBotª XXI nuke  Greg Parker	429         577         1006     91       196      1293     
..Fishbot           John Abbott Jr.	495         422         917      101      171      1189     
Robocide            Colin Jaffe	501         413         914      
HappyBot XVII 	      Greg Parker 	330         583         913      
.Superzot Jr. II    John Abbott Jr.	503         399         902      
 Sweetie            Stephen Linhart	477         379         856      
Orion               Theo Howell	482         362         844      
Soul Deliverer 8.6. Lucas Dixon	435         405         840      
More Spots          Theo Howell	467         369         836      
Death v6.25         Andrew Elliston	441         363         804      
Succubus            Eric Foley	444         357         801      
Death2 v6.14        Andrew Elliston	417         374         791      
Pagneezeeo          S. Trubetskoy 	416         374         790      
T-bot               John Abbott Sr.	409         381         790      
AnŽphode 2.6        Denys Seguret	376         362         738      
Radar X             S. Trubetskoy	393         337         730      
Ralph               Ed Schenk	376         325         701      
Billy               Matt Schenk	376         323         699      
Wraith              Eric Foley	392         293         685      
Cracheur M 4        Denys Seguret	320         345         665      
 MAGIC BUNNY        Brian Parker	298         336         634      
Wubba Boy           Adrian Packel	318         288         606      
Arnie 2             Jeremy Douglas	298         284         582      
StalkerBoy          Adrian Packel	275         298         573      
Grape of Wrath!     Daniel Velleman	297         262         559      
Clint               Jeremy Douglas	203         315         518      
I Dunno II          Adrian Packel	214         297         511      
Aurelious1          David Dolliver	206         295         501      
striker             Brad Naas	149         285         434      
Funky Doggy         Peter Manhart	129         266         395      
Braker              Brad Naas	125         267         392      
Fartcloud           Peter Manhart	95          231         326      
Miss Lisa           Riemer Brouwer	55          205         260      
Handy               Peter Manhart	25          213         238      



Team Competition

Author         	Robot 1             Robot 2             Score       
Colin Jaffe		Killer DogCow#1     Killer DogCow#2     283         
John Abbot Jr.		.Team fishbot       .Team Superzot Jr.  273         
Stephen Linhart	 Sweetie Team        Sweetie Team       264         
Greg Parker		HappyBot XIII Team  HappyBotª XXI Team  245         
Ed Schenk		+Ralph+             +Wilbur+            237         
Denys Seguret		AnŽphode T1         AnŽphode T2         215         
Sergei Trubetskoy	Team Pagneezeeo     Team Pagneezeeo     203         
Matt Schenk		-Bill-              -Mortimer-          202         
Brad Naas		J2                  M2                  111         
Brian Parker		 Scrubby Bubble     chicken             28          
Grian & Breg Parker	PokeyMorph          PokeyMorph2         28