Head on gun in melee

Folks, I have an issue which drives me crazy. How come that HawkOnFire with only head on gun have a high bullet bonus in melee? My EvBotNG is in top 20 in melee, yet when I run a simulation with HawkOnFire included, the bullet bonus it gets is just a touch higher than for Hawk's. Yes, EvBotNG survives way more often, so the survival bonus compensates.

When I try to use only the head on gun myself, my performance became even worse than the Hawk's one. I looked at the code and Hawk has only the head on gun. So HOW does it pull this miracle?

I'll have to think about it more, but off the top of my head, are you using the same bullet power? HoF uses power=3.0 a lot, which is more likely to give high bullet damage bonus. Also, if your bot's more survival oriented, it might keep more distance from opponents, which would cost you bullet damage in general.

And big congrats getting to #14 in Melee! Some very tough competition that high in the rankings.

I think you are right, the average distance must be the parameter in question. How could I forget about it.

Also, thanks for warm words with my humble progress. One thing in my mind is anti Diamond gun :) It is amazing how your bot survives with relatively short motions around a given conner in melee. I am thinking about a gun which instead of the most common GF would aim at the most visited location. I think it would score quite well against Dimond. But from the other hand, it looks like your bot is quite unique in this regard.

Do you have any recollections if this was tried in the glory days of robocode?

I don't remember anything like that. There were schemes like that for movement, I think, with different areas being considered safe/unsafe.

One thing I found helped a lot in Neuromancer was the bullet power formula, and taking distance of the target I was aiming at into account. Close targets get lots of bullet power, further targets get less bullet power. If lots of targets are bunched together, they also get lots of bullet power.

Good luck. I've been tempted a few times over the last few weeks to pull Neuromancer out and implement some of the features that are missing. If I do that I'd also like to open-source the current version of Neuromancer, since it seems nobody else has seriously tried a surf-everybody strategy.

It's very interesting watching the different movement strategies of different bots - Diamond sticking in the corners and picking off anybody who approaches, Shadow finding empty spots and aggressively clearing out close bots, Neuromancer skipping through the middle of the chaos and somehow dodging bullets.

The bullet energy formula is probably the most important ingredient, but every time I touch this even a little, my score drops down like a rock.

I am actually surprised by how few bots aim at Diamond in melee. It dances in a corner with a relatively simple triangular path with short motions. I would think a pattern matching gun should follow it quite well. But yet Diamond tend to out survive quite a lot of bots. But my old pattern matching gun is so sloooow, I did not even put in EvBotNG. From other hand, Diamond seems to be quite unique with this corner hugging strategy, so having a special gun just for it would not bring a big score boost.

Also, I think my old EvBot is dodging everyones bullets, it did not do surfing in the canonical form of predicting the bullet hit position, but it did take in account every wave. With new bot,I am hitting the skipped turns a lot, since I do exact path calculation and precise intersection now. I have a feeling that I do it wrong and it should not take so much CPU. But iterative procedures sucks, I should pull out my linear algebra skills and do non iterative hit position calculation.

As for Neuromancer, this one tend to survive in impossible situations. I use to think that you knew some hacks and actually see the bullets :)

Seeing Neuromancer in the open-source would be great. I do not see what stops you, I would not expect literate copies from true developers. But it would be loverly to see the tricks you use.

But even more exiting, would be to see new wave of discussions which comes with new developments. The wiki seems to be very quite lately, with not much going on.