Talk:Firestarter/Version History

Good to hear that some experiment was done with this rule-of-thumb. Anyway, did you find that improve your performance? Or some weight re-tune is needed imo.

Btw, are you using some online standard deviations algorithm and update the knn weights on the fly, or just do it offline with pre-collected data?

Yes, I think you mentioned this rule-of-thumb somewhere on the wiki, (or was it somebody else? not sure now) thanks for that. I found that improve my performance. However, I focused on becoming stronger against surfers, which made me weaker against non-surfers.

I just run a battle against some bot, collected the standard deviations and afterwards divided each attribute by the respective std deviation. I found that now the standard deviations remain pretty close to 1 against most bots.

Well, that's the easiest way I can think of... And it really surprised me that the standard deviation is almost the same for most bots. If so, then I think normalising standard deviation may not be that useful — since we already tune weights very hard. But for neural networks, I think this is invaluable, since we don't tune weights manually, and that would affect the learning speed a lot.

I never thought about normalizing standard deviation for neural networks, because they should adjust themselves to the attributes anyways. But yeah, the learning speed is probably affected by it, I should consider that for further NN experiments :D

Congratulations! Never imagined that wall stick length can affect score that much!

How you escalated the scoreboard aways surprised me, and I’m pretty sure there will be a tough fight at the top of 1v1. Congratulations man!

Indeed, impressive race to top-5. Congrats, Cb!

Really a quick rise in the Duel field, where the improvements are hard and failures are easy. Looks like the domination of Skilgannon really is challenged on all fronts. Having a stick that is too long reduces your battlefield, and when you accidentally get cornered, big trouble getting out. Having a stick too short lets you run into the wall if you don't brake => predictable.

also, a stick too short may make you stuck in corner ;) This happens especially to FancyWallStick like wall smoothing method, which is the type ScalarBot uses.

Thanks guys!

Exactly, I had thought that the former wall stick length of 200 would keep me from getting cornered but it also kept me too close to the opponent.

It seems to me like the optimal wall stick is somewhere about 120 and 150, as the wiki article about Wall Smoothing says.

Getting stuck in corners (especially against rammers) is also dependent on your dive-in protection. Sometimes the only way to get out is to go towards the opponent, and your dive-in protection lets you change direction into the corner again.