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I am teaching myself java programming with the sole purpose of playing the game.

With that said, I don't understand what counts as an instruction, and what does't.

Starting out, I had very low instruction levels. Since I was modeling them off the practice bots with a few tweaks, they didn't seem to generate many instructions. I actually changed quite a bit, and still kept it close to zero with a score of bots.

I added a lot of stuff since then though, and now each bot takes around 500 instructions!

I need help! I don't even know how it got so high! It doesn't seem like I did that much more typing.

It's java bytecode instructions; each time an instruction executes the count goes up by one. You can use javap to disassemble your bytecode to see exactly what the instructions are.

A line of code might be several instructions-- 500 doesn't actually correspond to /that/ much executed code, particularly if you have any function calls or loop over arrays or the like.

as segfault noted, 500 isn't very much. the sample bots are so simple that they hardly use anything, but more complicated bots will use a lot more instructions. since you have 100,000 per tick, you're far from hitting a problem.

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