Talk:GresSuffurd

I randomly came across this discussion today on oldwiki:The2100Club:

Phoenix was at .721 when I entered, and Dookious was at 1.27 when you entered? We've had some weird versioning stuff happening lately, man. =) -- Voidious

• wait till I get to 0.2.17 . . . -- GrubbmGait

I wonder what kind of weird thing will happen with your next version? =) --Voidious 00:32, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Probably passing Phoenix and becoming third, or winning from the whole top-50 and losing from ad.last.Bottom. The frightning part is that I do remember this remark . . . --GrubbmGait 01:10, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

I had something special in mind for version 0.2.17. I wanted to take the #1 of begin October 2004 (CassiusClay 1.9.9.24 or Ascendant 0.9.1), rename/rebuild it and enter it in the rumble. This was ment as a honour the #1 at the time I entered my first bot. But then the truth struck me, it would end up lower than my current version. Now I will just make an update to my movement and this time I will test it against a few more bots than just my old version. Top-20, here I come ! --GrubbmGait 00:00, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

That's a funny train of thought. =) The top bots when I started definitely hold a special significance to me, too. Ascendant, CassiusClay, PulsarMax, Shadow, and SilverSurfer formed the top 5, I believe. Those bots definitely still represent specific milestones to me; I was so happy when Diamond passed Ascendant, even tho he hasn't been King for years! --Voidious 00:35, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Bin Smoothing

I thought it might be useful for you to know about some testing I did a while ago, with regards to bin smoothing. I was trying to speed up my binsmoothing implementation by only using normal smoothing on the +-20 bins each side of the hit, and the rest of them just smoothing them towards 0 (the formula simplifies to just multiplying the bin value by a constant when smoothing towards 0, which was much faster). When I did this though, I lost a significant amount of score. I put this down to DrussGT not being able to say which way was 'safer' if it was stuck in an area that had never been within those +-20 bins.

My thoughts are that wavesurfing, when performing at optimal levels, has very little data to work with as there are very few bullet hits to log into the bins. Once I get a bullet hit, there are two possibilites that cover 95% of the bots in the rumble: either they are a learning gun and have seen me at that angle a lot, or they are a simple gun and always shoot at that angle for that set of conditions. There is a reason for both types of targeting that binsmoothing can help: for learning guns, that peak is not likely to be perfectly in the one point, due to the variation in movement etc. For the learning guns, if next time you move just slightly to the side, it is likely you have been there before, so they will quickly learn, as they don't have to add many wave hits to make that the new highest peak. In simple guns the segment covers a finite width of values, meaning that bullets on either side of this hit are likely when using this data for surfing in the future. As an example for this I imagine a linear targeting with a segmentation on lateral velocity, segmented say 0-2, 2-5, 5-8. A hit in the 2-5 segment, say with a lateral velocity of 3, will end up being used to predict bullets fired with lateral velocity of 2 or 4. Now, you could wait until you have enough bullet hits to say that there is danger all along the relevant range, but wouldn't you rather avoid those hits by just avoiding the entire area? =) Anyways, just my ramblings, although I do think you could gain quite a bit of score by using binsmoothing =) --Skilgannon 10:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

I understand your point, and it is a valid one. It really concerns 'surfing' on the slope of danger, instead of avoiding bricks with the chance of collateral damage. It is worth to test, as I am busy experimenting with my movement and botwidth-dangers. Binsmoothing in a gun I always found strange though, and with the knowledge of Precise Intersection it is an outdated technique in this field. --GrubbmGait 16:08, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm in agreement that (bin)smoothing in a gun is strange. In fact, I never use it because I've always had precise intersection, and the times I've tried smoothing in targeting have always reduced performance. In contrast, I've always had smoothing in surfing, for the kind of reasons Skilgannon talks about. Actually though... I'd theorize that what might be optimal for surfing is to only use smoothing for tiebreaking... I think that should cover the issues Skilgannon mentions... --Rednaxela 18:44, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

"safe spot created by colliding bullets"

One little question. You say "Not because it is a safe spot, for that wave the complete range is safe", but isn't it the case that the spots of hypothetical wave-intersection are safe even if the bullets don't actually collide? When there is no actual collision, there is a safe spot, but it is not the case that "the complete range is safe". --Rednaxela 14:04, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

You're right, but that is not my intention. For now I only want to 'trick' the opponent into believing that I would be hit if the bullets had not collided, in other words: polluting his stats. When bullets collide, that wave is turned harmless and I just want to do something extra with that wave. I don't expect much influence on the ranking though. Implementing real bulletshielding would imply a close interaction between gun and movement, and this is not on my agenda. --GrubbmGait 17:11, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, I see what you mean. I just meant, that even without a "real bulletshielding" gun, safe spots with no collision are created as a side effect. There seems to be a middle ground that doesn't require gun/movement integration. --Rednaxela 17:31, 14 August 2011 (UTC)