Talk:Innovations since 2005

This has been on my mind for a while. My goal here is to note the improvements that advance the state of the art and become ubiquitous among top bots, particularly since Wave Surfing (the last huge breakthrough). I'm sure I'm missing lots of stuff. Links to creators / original discussions are lacking, too.

Some notes on things I did/didn't include:

• I'm unsure about VCS anti-aliasing / interpolation. I do think it is a real improvement on VCS, but if it's not better than DC and only a couple bots use it, should it be here? Maybe it should, maybe not yet...
• I still think precise MEA is an important improvement, but others disagree and not many bots do it.
• Go-To Surfing is far from ubiquitous, but the dominant champion of 1v1 uses it, so imo it should be here.

At first, I'm hesitant to list things like LittleBlackBook or Darkcanuck's NN bots, just because they haven't influenced others much yet. This came to me as a counter-argument to "Robocode is stale, nothing left to discover!", so I tend to focus on the far-reaching improvements. But maybe that doesn't matter so much?

Feel free to add, edit, delete, discuss. =)

--Voidious 19:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, neat page. About VCS anti-aliasing/interpolation, well, I've been yet to out-perform it with DC, but that might just me. Really, it's hard to say if it's "better" or "worse" given that the specifics of how to configure/tune them are so much different. I'd just say that "anti-aliased/interpolated VCS", "nearest neighbor (DC)", and "very large VCS crowd" are all capable of top-tier targeting, and that differences in tuning are the predominant factor, rather than which if the three is chosen. Btw, Miked0801, I'm not sure if some of the ones you added fit the "since ~2005" description Voidious has in the preceding paragraph. Could you check on that? --Rednaxela 19:22, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Linear targeting probably doesn't fall into the 2005 catagory, but the others were created in the aforementioned time period. I also don't feel LBB fits here yet. If it becomes micro champion, then that achievement probably merits inclusion. It's stacked movement types is pretty unique though :) --Miked0801 23:39, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Older innovations

I'm pretty sure all these came long before Wave Surfing, but I'll leave them here in case we want to have a list that goes back to the beginning. (Added by Miked0801.)

• Linear Targeting / Random Linear Targeting - The basis of Guess Factor targeting is being able to accurately aim linearly after all. Many starting bots and many current nanos still just use head on targeting.
• Pattern matching - The first good guns all used pattern matching. String based Pattern Matching still is used by almost all the top nanos and micros.
• Anti-Gravity - Most top melee bots use some variant of this. DustBunny has a nano sized version, the reason it is the top nano melee bot.
• Byte Saving Techniques - There is a page here which shows all current techniques used to save space in the limited size divisions. Techniques are still being found farily often so this is a strong area of ongoing research.

--Voidious 17:37, 6 April 2010 (UTC)