Lesson in Parasitic Losses

I know some of you have said things about this recently, and version 11.7 of XanderCat is a good example. To be at the top, you really have to iron out all the little things to ensure there are not any score losses, even if they seem tiny. Squeeze every last point out of every feature you implement.

In version 11.7 of XanderCat, I updated my anti-mirror components. The new version was better in a lot of ways, and able to detect a wider array of mirroring tricks. However, my overall APS dropped enough to take me from 8th down to 12th place. The reason? More false positives on mirror detection (robots briefly detected as mirroring when it was really just coincidence). My new components, able to detect mirroring in a variety of new ways, amplified the losses from the false positives. Furthermore, it means I might be able to improve further than I had previously if I can completely stamp out of those false positives in a future version.

What other ways could I eliminate minor losses and see noticeable improvements in overall APS? What other ways might you be able to do the same? My next step will be to verify whether or not I'm losing any ground do to wall collisions (based on my latest stats, XanderCat runs into walls on average 43 times on every battle! But ultimately it depends on how much energy I'm losing from it, which I should know in another day).

Sorry to double post, but on the wall hits, consider: if you can slam into the wall at full speed and take a bunch of wall hit damage and it's your best chance to avoid a HOT or linear targeting shot, do you really want to rule it out as an option? Hitting the wall doesn't cost you score unless you lose a round, but taking some bullet damage costs you a lot of % score against such a bot.

Not enough battles to know for sure yet, but looks to me like eliminating hitting the wall will only have a very marginal impact on score. Version 11.8 is currently showing only 0.05 APS better than 11.7.2, despite hitting walls only about 1/3 as often. Oh well. On to the next possible improvement. I'd really like to get a solid lead over Hydra.