Randomized surfing

Why would being one tick late stop you from perfectly predicting their movement?

Skipping a turn or being a tick late may make a difference, since an enemy can move up to 8 pixels in that missed tick. Now I'm not so sure of this, but missing that tick could make your bot's recorded(saved) stats off of the actual ones. But again, it's only 8 pixels so it won't be off that much. The stats would be near-perfect, but not absolutely. Again, I'm pretty new to robocode so I'm not so sure.

Also, I may never release Phantom. The movement sounds a lot more complex than I thought. I'm no expert at robocode(meaning I don't have bots like DrussGT, Diamond, Combat, Nene, RougeDC, etc.).

There's a component you're missing, and that is the limited computational power available. By design, DrussGT doesn't know it's movements far enough beforehand to be able to predict what it will be doing as the currently fired wave hits. Not only that, but anybody attempting to predict DrussGT movements would have to predict many ticks of movements forward *every single tick*, and there isn't enough computational time to do that because just predicting DrussGT for a single tick already takes up a significant amount of the processing quota.

Perhaps for more light-weight bots I could understand how this could happen, but any multi-wave surfer can't be predicted like this because of processing time constraints.

You don't need to do this every single tick, only about every 15 ticks or so. And can spread the processing over many ticks. I didn't say it would be easy, but possible.

By the way, how does DrussGT calculate danger if it doesn't know where it will be when waves hit?

It knows where it will be, but it re-calculates dangers and precise-predictions every time the enemy moves >10% of enemyDistance. It also predicts enemy movements for use in the danger calculation, so the danger calculation changes based on the enemy movements. So you would have to re-calculate DrussGT's precise predictions in your simulations many times if you moved.

I'm thinking of incorporating a random gun and random movement just to future-proof DrussGT, although there are more fun things to do in the mean time =)

@ MN: You could potentially still win with 33%. That hit rate is fairly high against top bots such as DrussGT or Diamond(in my experience). You could still beat sitting duck, since you gain energy every time you hit. And sitting duck does not shoot, so you will still get 100%

You will do well against top bots(assuming you have good movement) with a 33% hitrate. You will do well against sitting duck with 33%. But you may not get such a good score against average bots since 33% is okay, the enemy may have a higher hitrate.