Talk:Dookious

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Wow, I didn't realize your AntiSurfer gun would be so valuable. -- Simonton

I'm surprised! I wonder what you would get it you disabled the flattener as well. -- Skilgannon

Hang on, just comparing with the last version, and it seems like you broke something. You only got 91% against HOF, and several other questionable results. -- Skilgannon

Good catch. What the heck could I have done here... I'll have to check this evening when I get home. -- Voidious

I also just took a peak at Dookiton, and it only got 93% against Barracuda. So it might pay to look a little deeper.. -- Skilgannon

(Edit conflict) I'm not going to do much debugging from work, but I did at least diff the source code briefly just now. I haven't the slightest idea what bug I could have introduced - it seemed like a pretty straightforward tweak. Maybe someone is running the rumble with only 256 megs and Dookious was running out of memory? Or it could just be a real bug in the movement... -- Voidious

If it was a memory issue surely it would be much worse against other memory-hoggers, not HOF. Did you entirely disable the anti-surfer, or just modify your VirtualGuns to not choose it for firing? There might be something in there that initializes a variable that your movement depends on (or maybe the rest of your gun depends on), and it throws an exception if it doesn't get initialized. -- Skilgannon

• I don't think it's anything like that (and the first thing I did this morning was double check =)). I just removed the gun from the VG array and hardcoded the chooser to pick the main gun. (I have a wrapper around my VirtualGuns.getBestGun to bias the main gun in some cases.) And there's no connection between the gun and movement. -- Voidious
• Ooops ... That would be me. The default memory setting in roborumble.(sh|bat) is 256m. -- Ebo
• Yeah, that should be increased to 512 as the default, I think, as it is in robocode.bat. I still can't say for sure if that's the problem with 1.583, but I sure hope so. =) -- Voidious
• Oh, and about it showing up against HOF. Well, it could be that other memory hoggers also run out of RAM if/when I do, or that it's not standing out that they crush me since I disabled the AntiSurfer gun. I dunno... -- Voidious

Ok, after 1.583b (rerelease) and 1.584, it looks like I get 5-6 points from my AntiSurfer gun and ~2 points (!!!) from my flattener. Two points! It's practically useless. Still only 2 losses (Phoenix and Shadow) in both cases, too. I'll have to look at the stats more closely before drawing any more conclusions, but some interesting data there, for sure. -- Voidious

Very interesting, have you tried running the TC/MC for those versions? I would suspect maybe the 35 round results won't change much, but in 500 rounds there must be a difference? -- ABC

No, I haven't. I suspect the gun would get crushed against the betters surfers in the TC, not sure about the movement. This was interesting, too... I compared 1.584 (no flattener) to 1.582 and sorted by average score. The 50 toughest bots were like -120 total (flattener good) and the 4th toughest segment (151-200) was +60 total (flattener bad); the rest of the segments were basically even. Makes sense, too: flattener helps a ton against the very toughest bots, but hurts a bit against the borderline bots. -- Voidious

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The results for Dookious seem corrupted, the details page doesn't show all the matches and your score has dropped below Phoenix. I think a re-release is in order ;-) -- Skilgannon

Word cloud

Beautiful word cloud! So, what is more, double or public? » Nat | Talk » 02:49, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Not sure. =) I'll have to re-run it and check the counts. --Voidious 13:38, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Bullet power experiment

I know I lost a lot of points with 1.60, but check out that wicked survival score. =) Over 95%! The change was one I was working on a couple weeks ago.

It uses my old, hand-crafted energy management for the first 200 shots (~5 rounds), then switches to a formulaic energy management system that tries to maximize energy differential. I track my own hit percentage and the raw odds of hitting (i.e., what Random Targeting would get) for all shots. This gives me a way of projecting an (hopefully accurate) expected hit percentage for any situation (since calculating RT odds is easy) at any bullet power. So I test the return on all increments of .01 and choose the best. Optionally (and enabled in this version), if it's a negative return, I don't shoot at all.

Of course, Robocode scoring is not purely Survivalist, so I knew there was an inherent problem with this. But I was having trouble coming up with another way of doing it. Any time I'm obviously going to win the round anyway, maximizing damage differential isn't helping my survival score, and I'm better off racking up bullet damage instead. Maybe I'll tinker with that.

--Voidious 13:38, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

How you did normalized hitrates in 1.60 for finding bulletpower sound exactly what I do in RougeDC. I find it interesting though, if I look here it appears that it lost you overall rumble score but gained in survival massively. This says to me that Dookious 1.60 optimized bulletpower the way that "RougeDC survival" did, by purely optimizing for energy gain. That lost main points while gaining survival (Make sure to compare the "Common % Score (APS)" and "Common % Survival" due to changes in rumble shaking up the scores lots). For example, see the Shadow score here, where it gains in survival, at a hefty overall score cost, because that is what energy gain is naturally about: survival. What I found gained points in both survival and overall, was optimizing a weighted combination of bullet damage and energy gain, which is what "RougeDC balance" does. Of course, the weighting of that combination was just guesswork, and if I wanted to improve it further I could make it adaptively decide that weighting.... :) --Rednaxela 12:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, I optimized for energy differential. I knew that wasn't the way to optimize score, but I just wanted to try it. It's really tough to purely optimize for score, since that involves knowing what portion of your %-score comes from survival and bullet damage in a given match. Cool to hear you got something that works with some mixing / hand-tuning, though, I should give that a try next time I take a look at that code. --Voidious 15:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Chookious/Dookalk?

Mind if I throw DookiLightning and DookiCape on Chalk to determine which stinks more - Chalk's gun or movement? Thanks! --Corbos 17:46, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Of course not, be my guest. "Dookalk" almost sounds Klingon. --Voidious 18:08, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

About your anti surfer gun

Could you share what the general strategy is? I'm trying to follow the code, but it's not evident to me still. Do you have special segmentation and/or faster rolling of the stats? If it's the former how do you reason when picking segmentation for surfers? --Curious George 19:05, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Mainly, it uses a very fast rolling average and lower weight to virtual waves. The common config stuff is in AntiSurfBufferBase (vs MainBufferBase). The rolling depth is 1, meaning a firing wave is weighted equal to all existing data (imagine each hit having double the weight of the previous one). And virtual waves are given a weight of .1 instead of .2 (firing wave weight=1), since surfers reacting to bullet fire should make virtual waves less useful.

The segmentation is separate from the main gun, but I don't think the differences are significant. IIRC I just branched from my main gun segmentation and then kept them separate so I could tweak them separately (it was probably the main gun I was tweaking). It also logs bullet hits negatively, but I don't think that makes much difference, either. --Voidious 19:36, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Trying that lowering of virtual waves now too. As it happens I also have a weight ratio of 1/5 between virtual and real waves. What do you mean by logging bullet hits negatively? -- PEZ 20:50, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, CC is probably where I got that 1/5 from originally. =) Basically, a bin loses points if a bullet hit lands there, in an effort to simulate what's happening in their surf stats. I know I was convinced at some point that this helped, but as of now I don't think it makes much difference. --Voidious 20:53, 7 November 2011 (UTC)