Talk:Wave Surfing

The Next Level

Quite a while ago I had an idea that could bring Wave Surfing to a new level, but I never got around to implementing it. Since the wiki's been quiet the last few days, I thought perhaps something like this might provide a kick to get things rolling again. My idea is Wave Surfing with a twist: not only do you surf the wave(s) that have been fired, but you also take into consideration the waves that have not yet been fired. By predicting your movement, you can predict what the enemy will see, and thus by looking at your movement stats you can see where they are likely to fire. Now, for the interesting part: by varying where you go, not only do you vary what GFs you reach, but you also vary what the enemy sees, and thus where they shoot. Danger can be calculated not only as a low point on a graph, but also on the entropy of the enemy's firing stats when presented with this movement. The more peaked the profile, the better this movement option (provided we can get to a low point). A system like this could basically 'figure out' how to do a movement type like Stop And Go, and probably other amazing types of movement we haven't thought of yet. There! How's that for some food for thought? =) --Skilgannon 20:23, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Some interesting thoughts here. I'm initially skeptical (as usual =)) because it reminds me of the diminishing returns on surfing waves beyond the first couple. But ignoring that... One hurdle with this is that while you can predict your own movement, you can't (accurately) predict the enemy's movement, which also impacts what they "see" -- distance, lateral velocity, wall distance, etc. depend on enemy location as well as your own. It's a funny thought to use your gun to predict their movement to assist in your own movement. =)

So let's say you can guesstimate the enemy movement -- and maybe the full range of their movement options are pretty similar for our purposes anyway. So for each of my movement options, I'd figure out if/when the enemy would fire (based on gun heat) during that prediction, check my stats of the enemy's bullets fired / bullets hit, factor in the precise max escape angle of that firing situation, and multiply the probability he would hit into the danger calculation. Kinda similar to how many of us factor in distance (and maybe instead of distance, since these two factors would not be independent). I'm still skeptical, but this sounds really interesting!

Good to see I'm not the only one still pondering the next big thing. =) I still want to find a breakthrough in Anti-Surfer Targeting... I know it's there!

--Voidious 20:52, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Gaff's anti-surfer score in the TC2K7 isn't enough? I have a dev. version that scores 82.93 against surfers (15 seasons) but worse overall once the random movers are averaged in. If you create a new Anti-Surfing Challenge I'll be happy to keep looking for improvements. =) --Darkcanuck 21:49, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, those are some pretty sick scores. Besides the scores themselves, it's particularly impressive that you nail Shadow and RaikoMX so well with one gun. I'm guessing not by the description, but do you simulate enemy surf stats in any way? That's the main area where I think a breakthrough might await, but even my best efforts haven't yielded much. That Anti-Surfing Challenge sounds pretty appealing, actually, even if it will do squat in closing the gap to DrussGT. =) --Voidious 00:34, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm very pleased with that gun. There's no simulation involved, besides a rough calculation of the min + max reachable GFs -- the rest is all NN magic. I promise to write it up one of these days, I'd like to see what tangents others might take. --Darkcanuck 03:58, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Fiddlesticks, this was going to be my killer idea once I made a wavesurfing bot!...Creating misleading spikes--CrazyBassoonist 21:10, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Approaching this from a slightly different direction, you could "snap" your movement to certain points when you know they're about to fire, essentially reducing the resolution of their segmentation. In a single turn you can do that with velocity, snapping it to 8, 5, 2, 0, -2, -5, or -8. In two turns you can also keep acceleration constantly at 0. With a few more turns' warning you could limit velocity to even fewer values. This would be easiest against bots that fire slow, infrequent shots since your movement would be disrupted less often. -- Synapse 23:29, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Interesting... for a simple movement (stop&go, flat, singlebuffer flattenerless wavesurf), it is possible to predict a reasonable accurate location in future. Thus it needs a lot of processing so I don't sure if it will run in time. But it may make up to 100 rounds to learn how they move. I never tried (but I'm writing a library that do this in past 2 months. It's call BattlePredictor, originally I will use it for melee)

One thing that should be consider when creating a wave surfing robot that use this generation, it should be totally useless against a simple gun and probably loss score (I'm highly doubt that using this may lead to another performance enhancing bug). » Nat | Talk » 01:28, 10 July 2009 (UTC)