Good Jump

Yes it makes sense. I once got +%5.2 APS by getting the sum of Anti-Surfer and Anti-Random weighted by their hit rates. (The old gun was just AS).

Do you use pre-processing in your NN? It can be really helpful.

I'm not sure what you mean by pre-processing. Can you clarify that?

• • For example you have two attributes x, y
  • Use some formula on it.
  • For example input = {|x|, |0.5 - x|, |1 - x|, |y|, |0.5 - y|, |1 - y|}
  • Give it to the Neural Network

Yeah, I did this. My worry about NN + DC gun is exactly because of this. The backprop algorithm gets really slow as my NN grows in the number of perceptrons, my general purpose DC gun is pretty slow and my anti-surfer DC gun is blazingly fast. When I put my AS NN together with my general purpose DC gun, I have to decrease the size of my NN and/or decrease the complexity of my training process to avoid skipping turns, which turns out to reduce my score. I was just wondering if the training process really needs to be that complex, or if I have room to improve other things like this pre-processing step or something like that, put that together with a very simple training process and still get a good result against surfers without using another NN, for example.

I just found it amazing that you and Darkcanuck could get such good results with NN. I found it really hard to debug and to work on compared to DC, since there is a lot of things you can tweak in a neural targeting system. Congrats for that, and I hope to see Xor results on his NN experiments soon as well :P