fading weights
(Maybe I should see how this fares before babbling about it, but anyway...)
How this works is: for each attribute, I have an initial weight, a final weight, and a final time (say, 20,000 ticks). The weight shifts linearly from initial to final value until final time, when it stays at final value. Tuning against my 500-bot, 4 season general rumble test bed, I increased my hit percentage from 23.21% to 23.90%. Not sure how much I could've gotten just re-tuning without the shifting, but testing just the initial weights or just the final weights came in around 23.1%. And the previous weights were genetically tuned in a similar fashion, so I think they were close to optimal.
How this came about is I was looking into a custom gun just for the first round of a battle, the way I've been using RetroGirl/Gun for the first few shots. I tried just tuning a KNN gun on 1-round battle data, and the result quickly outperformed my current settings, and the weights looked a lot different. After starting to implement it in Diamond and seeing promising (if incomplete) results, I thought of the more general solution of gradually shifting the weights. This too outperformed my current settings after very few generations. One thing that stands out is that my gun heat dimension starts at a very low weight and ends with a pretty high weight late in the match. This seems to make intuitive sense: as I have more data, it's better to favor firing waves more.
Now to cross my fingers that it produces in the rumble. =)
