Hitting Pure Flattened Movement?

I think a major problem is that hitting flatteners and surfers is two different things (Despite them often being combined). When running top bots (Diamond vs DrussGT), I notice that once their flatteners are enabled, they often can't decide to use main or anti surfer targeting systems. To me, it seems like an optimized gun for hitting surfers (Fast data decay, fire where they have gone in the past) is not the same as an optimized gun for hitting flattened movement (??? perhaps data decay rate that is opposite of theirs? perhaps a gun that fires at the lowest point of their estimated movement curve in the instead of the highest?), and advanced bots now just have a main + anti surfer gun, with no effective method of dealing with flatteners, let alone flattening combined with surfing. I can imagine the problem would only get worse if bots started having a % rating for their flattener, instead of a simply on or off, allowing to vary how much flattening they do.

YersiniaPestis has a non-binary flattener, like you describe. He is pretty tough, and I do like the idea. I have several thresholds in Diamond's surf stats, as well, not just 2 modes.

But I don't think some thrashing between guns is a big deal - I certainly don't read that much into it. You have fairly little data, two very strong guns, and an enemy that's constantly changing its movement profile, so a lot of fluctuation doesn't seem surprising. I don't see anything inherently bad about thrashing, either. I still think it's the right move to choose the highest rated gun at any given point, even if it changes every shot.

I don't know, I just don't see a strong distinction between targeting vs flatteners or surfers. It's all the same algorithms and using information that's available to both of you. But I'd love to see some innovation vs either or both. :-)

There seems to be a fundamental difference to me: Surfers avoid where they have been hit, and do not change their (segmented) movement profile till their hit. This means that fast learning, fast forgetting guns essentially relearn the new movement profile every time they change (when they are hit). Flattening bots constantly change their movement profile, hit or not. Thus a "classic" anti surfer gun will be constantly lagging behind. My point about the guns was not that rapid switching is a bad thing, but that current anti surfer targeting is not very effective against surfers with flatteners, to the point where guns optimized for non adaptive movement can match or outperform them. One thing to note is that a but that just flattens wouldn't be using adaptive movement.

A few thoughts. First, yes, the difference is one uses bullet hits and the other uses visits to update its stats. If you're hitting the enemy at all consistently, this is more a difference of granularity than of rate of decay. Is there a general correlation of bullet dodging/flattener to decay rate, like flatteners decay faster? Maybe, but that seems like a guess for now.

Against most surfers, my non-decaying gun is actually the strongest gun I have. I guess those surfers have enough exploitable weaknesses unrelated to their surf stats to outweigh what I can gain from a fast decay rate. As a result, I really only tune the Anti-Surfer gun against the very strongest bots - some subset of DrussGT, Shadow, Tomcat, and XanderCat. My Anti-Surfer gun decays based on visits, not bullet hits, which it actually knows nothing about. So in terms of the metric, it's more like a flattener. I guess it probably is more tuned as an anti-flattener than anti-bullet dodger.

And you could look at it another way. Diamond and DrussGT's main guns are pretty much the strongest guns in existence. Against most bots, they crush the Anti-Surfer guns. The fact the Anti-Surfer guns can compete at all in that matchup is notable. And DrussGT is an insanely hard bot to hit - I wouldn't be shocked if both of my guns perform about as well as Random Targeting at certain points in the match.

I've been experimenting with an anti surfer gun which decays on shots and on hits/ bullethitbullets , its working reasonably well vs top bots with flatteners disabled. (Not good enough yet though...) I am suprised the anti surfer gun isn't used vs most surfers, but then again I've only been doing tests vs DrussGT, Diamond, and other high ranking bots... The difference I see is that a pure flattening bot would change its profile every wave, while a pure surfing bot would have the same profile until hit.