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I had some strange experiment result. My guns are constantly doing worse than random against top surfers (oh no), but whenever I switch to some real random gun, it only decreased my score. Maybe a learning gun gives better bullet shadow? There's little study how guns affects bullet shadowing since its passive. Maybe adding some "active" thing to random gun helps.

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.