Congratulations on 100% PWin!

DrussGT has a random gun as backup just in case some optimal bot does get invented ;) Unfortunately, it seems it has a weakness in the bullet power selection. I'll have to take a look at that...

Looking at DrussGT's virtual gun scores, the random gun does surprisingly close to the other ones against top surfers! The learned weights for BeepBoop's anti-surfer gun (1) put a lot of emphasis on wall features, (2) put basically no weight on historical features like time since decel, and (3) puts basically no weight on recency of the wave. This makes me wonder if BeepBoop's anti-surfer gun mostly acts as a slightly better random gun that is better at handling walls rather than something that learns patterns in the other bot's movement.

Well, DrussGT's random gun does take maximum reachable angles into account, which is probably 80% of wall effects. However there's probably something there about bots being hesitant to get closer to the enemy, even if they could potentially reach a further angle, which skews the distribution away from the reachable angles which are affected by walls. It would be interesting to do something with this hypothesis, but for me the random gun is really there as an emergency backup against someone simulating DrussGT's gun or something similar.

As long as both bots are using the same firepower, bullet collisions don't help you much: you don't get hit, but also you don't hit the opponent! So I thought a bit about adding active bullet shadowing to BeepBoop, but decided it wassn't worth the effort. I guess it could still help you situationally if for the moment your chance of hitting is lower than the opponent's. For example, if you are stuck near a wall, maybe you could create a shadow to cover your escape from the wall, but it would be complicated. Also for this reason, maybe hit rate should really be measured as hits / (shots - collisions), although getting this statistic for virtual guns isn't possible. If you are measuring hit rate as hits / shots, it could look like your random gun is better when really it just isn't creating as many bullet collisions.

Wow, you got the point! Random gun is better because they don’t suffer from bullet collision — but they do suffer from it when actually used. Since bullect collision can’t be simulated, the only way is by measuring hit rate without collision, which is a little biased since different gun may have different collision rate.

And I guess BeepBoop's AS gun works pretty well not because its some better random, but rather most surfers have significant weakness near walls. They generally weight distance very high to prevent getting too close (future risk), but essentially making them weak at dodging bullets near this scenario. Some repeated patterns exist because they learned the hit but still get to the same position.