genetic tunings

I'm curious about your genetic optimization stuff. This is using genetic algorithms to tune attribute weights with pre-gathered data using your WaveSim-like system? Or is there any GA stuff happening mid-battle? I've generally believed WaveSim wouldn't work against surfers, but at one point I convinced myself I might as well try. I gathered a bunch of data, only to find that HOT outperformed my guns against it, which convinced me it was probably useless. Have you run real battles to check that the improvements correlate, or are you just dropping them in the rumble?

Well, on Talk:DrussGT/Version_History#Anti-Diamond_tuning_.3D.29_404 already stated it was fixed pre-gathered data.

My suspicion is that while HOT performs better than actual guns in such tests, WaveSim-type tests could still be useful(but non-optimal) against surfers in restricted domains (i.e. changing the relative weights in segmentation). For instance... I suspect it may be less useful for changing relatively "dynamic" things like VG rolling weight paramters, than just how segmentation works.

I would say that if HOT is outperforming your guns in classifying/regressing the wave values it probably means that your gun isn't shooting towards GF0 often enough, making the surfers move towards GF0 too often. I haven't actually tested to see if HOT is outperforming my guns, but just changing the weights in my gun can improve my hitrate by ~8% (difference between worst (random) weights and best (final) weights).

I've thought maybe my process should involve recording WaveSim data, doing genetic tuning, recording new WaveSim data with the new tuning, and repeating until it converges. I think this would do quite a good job of having the same effect as genetic tuning directly against a surfer, but much faster.

Well, I'm not sure it means that... I'm not sure how you'd even code a gun to shoot at GF=0 more often (besides stupid ways =P). Regardless, it makes it pretty clear that what works in WaveSim is not what works in real battles, since HOT would perform dismally in real battles vs surfers.

The reason I thought WaveSim might still work against surfers is that even though your WaveSim targeting decisions are based off of a different movement profile than they would be in a real battle, the characteristics of the real vs simulated movement profiles may not be different enough to matter. You're still making each firing decision off the same data set. So maybe I will give it a shot. (Hopefully I didn't delete all that data...) I also love your idea about tuning/re-gathering data.

DrussGT 2.4.5 certainly far outperforms 2.4.4 against Diamond, so that's something. Then again, I've done so much anti-DrussGT tuning recently that it's possible just about any change you made would have improved your score against Diamond. =)