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I don't know how other bots solve the problem of targeting curve flatteners, but one possible solution would be to create an anti-flattener gun. Such a gun would give guess factors a negative weighing each time they were visited.
I thought about that too. The problem is many bots use different slices for different segments, different algorithms. I'm not sure about that.
Yeah, maybe there is a way to detect which slices/segments/algorithms the other bots use, and then the gun could be pretty strong. I am not sure either. I guess implementing it would be complicated.
Another important thing is that the bots surfs the waves in different ways. To have a %100 hit rate the bot should fire when the enemy bot is at the centre of the battlefield to remove the Wall Smoothing factor and there shouldn't be any other bullets in air(Multi-Wave Surfing).
There is a problem with this approach. Typically, you have about 10 sectors to shoot (if we divide guess factor range, by the bot body). Good curve flattener could be anywhere in a random fashion, even in just visited sector. So at best you increased your chances to 1/9 vs 1/10, in practice it is still 1/10. I have a random gun among list of available ones for my bots, often it gives the best result against curve flatteners. Sometimes, antiguess factor would lead you in wrong direction: I think DrussGT avoids GF=0, but with negative weight for visited spots, you soon will fire at GF=0 only, and unavoidably lose.
My strategy just fire randomly in this case, at least you get a chance to hit.
Actually you can increase the chance of hitting by firing when the robot is near a wall.
Randomly choosing an angle in the reachable area is a good fallback strategy. DrussGT does this, although this gun rarely gets used. It is more as a safety in case someone copy-pastes his gun and then surfs it.
People have experimented a lot with Anti-Surfer guns over the years, but nothing seems to work better than a GF gun that only works on very recent data. And once the enemy starts flattening there is very little you can do. At this point fighting at a distance or bulletpower where you are more competitive might be a better idea, and turn on your own curve flattening as well.
You are right. I just tried a weighted random gun with reverse weights and it didn't do better than the anti-surfer gun.
