Tournament X ResultsJuly 28, 1995Congratulations 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 JadeIndividual 2nd Doug Harris *CL79*Individual 3rd Jean-Francis Lechat CarneYouth Greg Parker HappyBot™ XXI nukeTeam Colin Jaffe Killer DogCow #1 Killer DogCow #2Icon Contest Breg & Grian Parker The PokeyMorph TeamFor 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
