User talk:Simonton/PFResearch

Vibrate Instead of Stop

0080 is a test of something I've been curious about for a long time. How much difference would it make, instead of stopping, to vibrate slightly, so that 1/2 the time you can accelerate the direction you choose starting at (almost) speed 2, instead of 1. For those who are counting, that puts you (almost) 7 pixels ahead of the competition by the time you both reach full speed. That's not much. In the MC2K7, my scores changed like this (run with 75 seasons):

• .18 drop against Splinter & .38 drop against GrubbmGrb. How could doing this hurt my score? Is there this much error in scores at 75 seasons there can still be a .38 variance? It makes me think I wasn't precise-predicting correctly, but I'm pretty sure I already have enough checks in place that will spew out errors when such things go wrong. I'll update here if I do find there was a bug.
• .02 gain against Waylander, .18 gain against GrubbmThree, & .37 gain against Chalk. It must have made no difference against these bots. I could believe the gains against GrbbmThree and Chalk were real, if it weren't for the fact that the same drops were experienced against Splinter and GrubbmGrb.
• 1.01 gain against RaikoMicro, 2.55 gain against Ascendant & 2.05 gain against CassiusClay. I must believe these are real gains beyond the margin of error. They are major gains. I suspect it messes with their segmentation (time-since-direction-change comes to mind), and that is what explains the gains.

This experiment has certainly been interesting! I'll be running another 75 seasons of one of my bots, to see how much variance there is in the scores. --Simonton 23:06, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm thinking the minimal difference against GrubbmThree is due to the fact that you don't really ever stop. The gains against Raiko, Ascendant and CassiusClay I believe are due to you being able to spread out your location over a wider area, so even random targeting can't hit you as easily. Nice work! --Skilgannon 14:44, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Really? I find it hard to believe gaining only 7 pixels of escape every once in a while (50% of the time I actually stop at a wave, which is ... I dunno ... 10-20% of waves?) could make more than a slight difference. --192.88.212.34 15:45, 18 September 2008 (UTC)