I will run another beginners oval racing series in May-June 1998. Everybody is welcome to participate - send your robot, or if you participated last year, just send me message that you would like to participate. I'll try to get some new people by advertising in newsgroups as well. There is also a little RARS FAQ now - I compiled it from the questions that have appeared in list in last three years. http://evolution.bmc.uu.se/~maido/rars/tutor/FAQ.htm Maido _______________________________________________________________________ BORS-Beginners Oval Racing Series 1998 OVERALL This series is intended for newcomers, but experts are welcome as well. The source code of all robots will be PUBLIC. Even more, I encourage of writing clear commented code that can help others. The whole RARS community wins from that. The series will be run on 8 oval tracks, they are included in Rars 0.72 package. You can get them from my web-page (http://www.ebc.ee/~mremm/rars/traks1.htm or http://evolution.bmc.uu.se/~maido/rars/traks1.htm) but look for new-format tracks. All tracks have ONLY left turns, so you don't have to think about complicated chicane-situations. SCHEDULE I am planning to run races at Thursdays, for 4 weeks. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, 8.00 AM GMT. I strongly suggest submitting one-two days before deadline, then we have time to clear out errors that could appear. No late submissions are accepted after the races are run, whatever the reasons could be. Submit robots as a source code to maido@evolution.bmc.uu.se. The same address is valid for information. Tentative racing schedule: 14.05 Oval2 200 miles oval2.trk Milwaukee 200 miles mlwaukee.trk 21.05 Nazareth 200 miles nazareth.trk Phoenix 200 miles phoenix.trk 28.05 Pocono 200 miles pocono.trk Indianapolis 500 miles indy500.trk 03.06 New Hampshire 200 miles loudon.trk Michigan 500 miles michigan.trk RULES 3 races on each track! Qualifying for fastest lap of 12 qualifying laps. Cars slower than 150% from fastest car will not qualify for the race - so you still have fair chance to qualify if you are not purposely slow. Cars will start in qualifying order. Typical command line will be: rars track -ql12 -r3 -l200 Points are awarded in PPG IndyCar style* to each robot for each race. The same points are accumulated up to the end of BORS to find an overall winner of the series. Only the best robot-car will score points to it's owner towards the overall standings. SUBMISSIONS I accept more than one robot per person. As many as you want to submit. If we will have more than 24 qualifyers, I discard slower #3 or #2 robots to give everyone's #1 car a chance to participate. Intentional blocking or ramming of other cars is not allowed. Also, intentional slowdown in race, in purpose to damage other cars is not allowed. I will make final decision about disqualification of such cars. All submitted robots will continue to participate at following events until removed by author. SOFTWARE A version 0.72b of RARS will be used. Most likely I will compile on Linux with gcc. Movies will not be recorded. People who cannot install rars0.72 can develop their cars with version 0.71 - the only significant difference is that s.dead_ahead has improved in ver. 0.72 RESULTS will be published in the mailing list as soon as possible, hopefully next day. The bots will be available through WWW. THE WINNER OF BORS will be the person whose robots earned more points in series. In case of tie, the number of wins or better positions is considered. NB! If you have submitted two or more robots, only the best of your robots is scoring points for you in the overall BORS contest of eigth race events. My own cars will compete as others and score for race points, but will be excluded from overall standings. (*)In IndyCar 12 first finishers get points (20,16,14,12,10,8,6,5,4,3,2,1). One point is awarded to fastest qualifier and one point to the car that lead most laps. ________________________________________________________________________________