title: Saving object for future use
body: <p>I am writing a program (a bot) to play a Risk-like game in an AI competition. I'm new to programming so I've used some very basic coding so far. In this game, each round the program receive some information from the game engine. In the program, I have a class <code>BotState</code>, which allows me to treat information from the current round, such as the opponent bot moves, or the regions currently under my control, etc. This information is put in some <code>ArrayLists</code>. I have some getters to access this information and use them in the main class.</p>
  
  <p>My problem is that each round, the information is overwritten (each round means a new run of the program), so I can only access the information from the current round. What I would like to do is save all of the information each round, so that for example if the game state is at round 10, I still can access the moves that the opponent made on round 8.</p>
  
  <p>I looked for ways to solve this problem, and I came across something named "object serialization". I didn't quite understood how it works, so I would like to know if there is a simpler/better way to do what I want, or if serialization is the way to go. Thanks for your help.</p>
  
  <p>edit: I can't link the program to my disk or a database. I upload the source files of the bot to the game server, so everything has to be in the source files</p>