Documentation

A counter that is decremented upon each step of the robot within the CESK machine. Initially set to robotStepsPerTick at each new tick.

The need for tickStepBudget is a bit technical, and I hope I can eventually find a different, better way to accomplish it. Ideally, we would want each robot to execute a single command at every game tick, so that e.g. two robots executing move;move;move and repeat 3 move (given a suitable definition of repeat) will move in lockstep. However, the second robot actually has to do more computation than the first (it has to look up the definition of repeat, reduce its application to the number 3, etc.), so its CESK machine will take more steps. It won't do to simply let each robot run until executing a command---because robot programs can involve arbitrary recursion, it is very easy to write a program that evaluates forever without ever executing a command, which in this scenario would completely freeze the UI. (It also wouldn't help to ensure all programs are terminating---it would still be possible to effectively do the same thing by making a program that takes a very, very long time to terminate.) So instead, we allocate each robot a certain maximum number of computation steps per tick (defined in evalStepsPerTick), and it suspends computation when it either executes a command or reaches the maximum number of steps, whichever comes first.

It seems like this really isn't something the robot should be keeping track of itself, but that seemed the most technically convenient way to do it at the time. The robot needs some way to signal when it has executed a command, which it currently does by setting tickStepBudget to zero. However, that has the disadvantage that when tickStepBudget becomes zero, we can't tell whether that happened because the robot ran out of steps, or because it executed a command and set it to zero manually.

Total number of tangible commands executed over robot's lifetime

Histogram of commands executed over robot's lifetime

Total number of CESK steps executed over robot's lifetime. This could be thought of as "CPU cycles" consumed, and is labeled as "cycles" in the F2 dialog in the UI.

Sliding window over a span of ticks indicating ratio of activity