Assignment Task One

Alexander Wood

10th Feburary 2007

IPT6

http:\\thekandieman.com\nfwu\lrp.php

What does this system do?

The LRP Graphing system converts roborumble bot details into graphs.
The roborumble is an effort to have up-to-date rankings of robots in the programming game robocode, in which virtual tanks battle in an arena.
The X-axis is the expected score for a bot to get, and the Y-axis is the problem-bot
index. Full red color means that the actual score is 0%, full green color means that the actual score is 100%, other colors are in between.

Links to sample input and output of this Information System:
Sample Bot Ranking Details: (Input)
http:\\rumble.fervir.com\rumble\RatingDetails?game=roborumble&name=techdude.Carruthers%201.2.4
Sample Bot LRP Graph: (Output)
http:\\thekandieman.com\nfwu\lrp.php?name=techdude.Carruthers%201.2.4

More info on the roborumble: http:\\robowiki.net?RoboRumble

How is this system used?

This information can be used in many ways. The most obvious use is to easily display a bot's performance against various levels of other bots. This can simplify and reduce the number of bots a bot author needs in his testing pool. This information can also be used to display the strengths and weaknesses of bots, to create other bots to exploit these weaknesses.

System Environment

The User requests a calculation of a robot's LRP graph using his web browser. (Since the user is most likely a Java programmer, he would have no problem with the modification of a URL.)
The LRP Calculation script recieves this request and sends a request to the roborumble server for the bot's rating details.
The LRP Calculation script recieves the data and processes it, outputting a hypertext document and an image file.	<!-- Output from LRPGraphs v3, by Nfwu. Under the GPL 2 licence.--> <H2>GRAPH FOR techdude.Carruthers 1.2.4 IN GAME roborumble </H2><img src="/lrp/roborumble_techdude.Carruthers 1.2.4.gif usemap="#botmap""></img><Map name="botmap"><Area name= ...
Finally, the user's web browser displays the recieved hypertext document and retrieves the image to be displayed.

The environment therefore consists of:

Bot Authors (Users)
Web Browser (Graphical front-end / I.S. that depends on the LRP Calculator)
Web Server (Script Requests/Retrevial of Image)
Roborumble Server (The Information System that the LRP Calcuator depends on for data)
LRP Calcuator (The Information System)
Me (Participant: To maintain the Information System, remove bugs, clean up the image cache every now and then)

What information technology is used by the system?

The information system depends on the following infomation technology:

The Webserver upon which it runs.
The internet for communication.

What improvements have occurred as a result of this system?

This information system has drastically shortened the amount of time required for analysis of the roborumble rating details. Instead of going through a list of nearly 500 bots, one can now display a simple graph that shows, at a glance, the possible weaknesses of their bot.
This information system has removed the need for a bot author to manually analyse the table or to manually enter it into a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel for analysis.

How has this system affected people's lives?

One now has more time to do more productive tasks like exercise, instead of spending endless hours in front of a monitor inputing numbers into excel since copy-pasting doesn't work.
This also allows one to quickly check-up on their bot's preformance no matter where they are, as long as they have a computer with internet access nearby.