Talk:ScalarBot/Version History

Recently I noticed some very very low score, some are run on my machine, none of which can be reproduced even with thousands of rounds. However, when some exception is thrown in one round, it will only affect that round.

Then if the zero score is caused by uncaught exceptions, it must be thrown in every round. What else can get my bot disabled in every round? It seems that my bot is not firing even one bullet, or moving even one pixel, in the rest of rounds.

I had this problem about one years ago and I fixed it by finding an infinite loop that doesn't use getXXX() or setXXX() methods. Another thing I did was rewriting everything again starting from the last version.

Thanks for sharing! Do you mean an infinte loop will disable your bot for every round? It seems that infinite loop will cause the system console print something like (xxx not stopping, trying a force stop), e.g. Krabby is printing 35 of that messages per pairing on my machine. So that should only affect one round by it self. Anyway, I’m not receiving that message on the broken battles.

Yes, I mean that but if you don't call the XXX methods, the program doesn't throw an exception. It causes the bot to get stuck and stop updating itself or sometimes it disables the bot.

I've been thinking about that for ages — Is it better to use guns with similar attributes & weights but different decay rate, or guns with very different settings?

I was using the former in 0.012m7, then tried some very different weights in main gun in 0.012m8.

What's very interesting is that with main gun only, the performance is increased (comparing 0.012m8.1 with 0.012l29) after more battles, the performance decreased considerably ;)

But when put into VG array, the better gun results in considerably decreased performance (comparing 0.012m8 with 0.012m7)

What I'm experiencing is that, two strong guns, when combined, resulting worse performance — and the improvement of one of them is making the combination even worse ;)

Note that my VG is selecting the best gun based on normalized total hit rate, without any decay.

This discussion about CC VG may help, though I've never experimented with it since I have other things to improve besides my VG. Link

Thanks for the link! It's good to know some of my random thoughts got experimented, and also many new thoughts I've never came up with beforef. However, I'm also surprised by the fact that others are also struggling ;/

Intuitively when you put two similar guns, it's hard for the VG to actually differentiate between the two. On the other hand, when you have two totally different guns against a learner, you are on the case that when you are scoring your secondary gun, he is actually reacting to your primary gun, and if they are really different the hit rate may not be so meaningful.

Anyway, most of the top bots today use a simple VG array based on hit rate, so their authors must have experimented more with the weighting schemes than with the strategy of picking the best gun.

Since AS guns are secondary (most targets still don't have strong surfing movement), imo it's worth sacrificing it a little bit to make sure it is not chosen against non-adaptive targets.

But the problem with the former, in my experiments, is that the AS gun is firing almost the same with main gun a lot of time, and winning in border cases with luck (when main gun and AS gun is both firing at the right direction, but main gun miss by, say 1px). But even against non-adaptive targets, how bad the combination did, comparing with solo, also surprised me. (against RaikoMicro, sometimes the rating says even the AS gun solo is better than the combination)

Virtual guns against a surfer is nasty business, since your gun learns a movement that will change once the VG enables it. I tried to keep my VG array to a minimum, and instead focus on making 2 really good guns, plus a random gun for future proofing.

Thanks, may be two ordinary guns combined to be even worse, but two strong guns are combined to be better ;)