Hitting Pure Flattened Movement?

Has anyone made a targeting system capable of hitting a good sandboxFlattener (Perhaps a top bot with surfing disabled and flattener enabled by default) better than top bots hit strong random movement? This would be a good start for hitting combined surfing and flattening, which is driving hitrates of top guns into the ground ( Below 10, sometimes even 9%).

What makes you think you could predict a curve flattening movement better than a "random" movement? A good curve flattening movement is a lot like random with a forced even distribution, like Java's Math.random(). It should always have a higher entropy than a naive random, I think.

It seems like its theoretically possible to get a higher hitrate (without simulating their movement) because you know that they will move away from where they have moved before, while in random movement there shouldn't be a correlation between where they have moved and where they do move.

It's possible. A random with an even distribution is less predictable than a skewed random, but it's only a hunch that curve flattening resembles the former.

But while knowing where they won't be is something, and could increase your hit rate, it's really quite far from knowing where they will be. You could know where they won't be 100% of the time and never hit them. :-) And of course there is a correlation in random movement between where they have moved and where they will move, since they are determined by the same algorithm. Isn't it more useful to know where they will be vs where they won't be?

To know where a flattener will be, you'd have to figure out quite a lot about their stats to be able to shoot at the least visited reachable point with any accuracy. And that truly is the holy grail of Anti-Surfer guns, since you could also destroy a normal surfing system if you knew that much (ie, not just a flattener). When surfing first came along (~2005), a lot of folks thought this would happen almost immediately, but so far they are still wrong.

Oh, and I don't mean to sound too discouraging! I actually think of improvements in Anti-Surfer targeting as one of the remaining frontiers in Robocode, and probably one of the nearer ones. I've spent quite a lot of time trying Anti-Surfer stuff myself, including stuff that precise predicts enemy movements or penalizes places they've been hit. But the best I've come up with in Diamond is still just a simple fast-decaying / well-tuned gun.