DC and VCS

I feel like "weighting everything equally" is almost an impossible notion. Like say you divide lateral velocity (range 0-8) by 8, and distance by 1000, and now you have them both in the range of 0-1, weighted "equally". But the lateral velocity is effectively weighted higher since the distribution is so much more spread out across the full range than distance (which is rarely 0 or 1000, and very frequently 400-600).

I've had some success with genetic algorithms for tuning attribute weights (with WaveSim), but still not a huge improvement on just hand tuning. The GA stuff is fun to play with though... Got some experiments running right now, in fact. ;)

I'm planning on some GA-esque searches on my weights for tuning down the road with deBroglie. How do you set up a nice loooooong set of 35 round Robocode battles for this? RoboResearch?

RoboResearch is certainly the tool of choice for running long sets of tests, but you'd really need your own layer of code on top of it to do any GA stuff. I'd instead just use the Robocode control API (which is pretty easy) for running the battles and collecting the results from your GA code, which is probably easier than manipulating RoboResearch.

The issue I haven't tackled yet is how to actually export each version of the bot to test. You'd have to package it from code with an Ant task or something, or export a .properties file that the bot reads in (probably the route I'll take).

All my GA stuff so far has used WaveSim, but I want to use some real battles to rewrite RetroGirl's movement. Keep in mind that GA with real battles will be VERY slow... I've had GA runs that take many days using WaveSim, and WaveSim is orders of magnitude faster than real battles.

Trying to workaround the slowness of full battles can be part of the fun. There are advanced GA techniques out there to deal with slow fitness functions. I tried some of them with Combat, tuning movement/targeting/energy management weights, all at the same time, against DrussGT in full battles. It gave me a +10% APS increase against it in 2 days, but a huge APS decrease against the rest of the population (Combat 3.9.0 (GA tuned) and Combat 3.8.2).

Maybe I´ll try GA tuning against the whole population someday, to avoid the specialization artifact that happened before.

I was thinking that a bot could read/write data from its local file directory. Read the file as "parents," select parents via fitness function, apply crossover/mutation.. load those values as weights, fight, write result at end of battle.

Lather rinse repeat for thousands of battles. Maybe start culling the least fit members of the population once it gets large enough...

This relies on the bot itself to determine its own score though... iffy.

Ah, yeah, that's an interesting idea. In 1v1 you should be able to determine the score. But I know I have a lot of other state associated with the GA stuff itself, so it would be some extra pain to have to import/export that every battle. You'd also miss out on any chance to multi-thread it.

Very interesting experiment! And it's shaping up to look like a fascinating answer!

More accurately, for VCS, I would guess attributes don't have a level of "importance" (in the algorithm itself, using some is more important than using others), you just test how much you can segment the data while still having enough data, and choose arbitrary cutoff points, which is probably why I find KNN more intuitive. But I'm still trying to think of a proof for an optimal similarity between a VCS system with evenly distributed data accross all dimensions, with a set number of divisions in each dimension, but the divisions being started arbitrarily while being evenly spaced (ie. any number between 0 and 100 is the start of the first distance bin, each bin covers 100 units, and we pretend the points can't be less that the minimum value)