(Instructions, that should exist)
Quickscanners - Introduction
Quickscanners are important and very interesting building blocks of most successful warriors. They are used during the start of a fight and quickly perform a few scans to find the opponent. If they have found something they usually bomb the area in the hope to kill the opponent. Quickscanners sacrifice "memory" for speed and therefor are an easy prey for other quickscanners.
Simply adding a quickscanner to your code is not enough. You have to use a nearly optimal attack and adjust your warrior to perform optimally along with the quickscanner. To show how that is done, I will use an example warrior throughout this text. It is called Parchment.
A simple paper
Parchment is a silk-style paper. If you do not know what papers are or
how they work, I suggest, that you read
Christian Schmidt's wonderful paper tutorial.
I will create a lot of different versions of Parchment. Always be sure to use and download the correct
version, if you want to work with it.
Source of Parchment 1.0.0 (Size: 514 byte)
;redcode-94nop ;name Parchment ;version 1.0.0 ;author Jens Gutzeit ;strategy paper ;assert CORESIZE == 8000 ORG boot ;; ;; boot ;; ; create 8 processes boot spl } 1 spl 0 spl 1 ;; ;; paper ;; pStep1 EQU 3217 pStep2 EQU 2345 pStep3 EQU 4186 pHit EQU 2185 pStream EQU 3796 silk1 spl @ silk1, > pStep1 mov.i } silk1, > silk1 silk2 spl pStep2, silk2 mov.i > silk2, } silk2 mov.i pBomb, > pHit mov.i < silk2, { silk3 silk3 djn.f pStep3, { pStream pBomb dat.f < 2 * 2667, < 2667 END
S. Fernandes was so kind to name the warrior and
Barkley Vowk provided computers for optimizing and benchmarking it. Thanks a lot!
Benchmarking
To measure the performance of a warrior, you usually let it fight against a benchmark
(a predefined set of warriors) or send it to a hill. In this text I will use the first option
and use the
fsh94nop-benchmark (version 0.3) by Christian Schmidt. It contains a lot of very good warriors, which are sorted according
to their strategy:
- clr (coreclears, one- and twoshots)
- scn (scanners)
- cds (clear-directing scanners)
- pap (papers)
- pws (papers with separate stone)
- pwi (papers with 3- or 7-point imps)
- sai (stones with A-imps)
- sbi (stones with B-imps)
- stn (stones without imps)
A good warrior should perform in any of the above categories well. Unfortunately that is not always possible. Parchment 1.0.0 scores as follows against the benchmark:
Before adding a quickscanner to Parchment we should take a more detailed look at it.
