Precise MEA

Ok, so while I await the results from the latest release to see if my new strategy works, I wanted to know two things: 1) What do the experts think about imprecise MEA causing randomness in targeting?

2) Does anyone have an efficient, accurate method for calculating MEA?

The worst thing I see with imprecise MEA is shooting walls.

Imprecise MEA is not responsible for imprecise targeting. Precise MEA only cuts off angles that are not reacheable by the opponent. Simply said, precise MEA has only advantages. The benefits of imprecise targeting on the other hand, can cause quite an interesting discussion. Imprecise targeting is not perse worse than precise targeting, f.e. random targeting can be a valid strategy against (very) good bots.

Scaling/segmenting your gun differently than your opponents dodging makes it harder to learn/dodge and can be good. As long as it doesn´t shoot walls (unreachable angles). DrussGT keeps changing its gun weights (segmentation) in the next version every time someone knocks it off the top and seems to be working very well.

Well, that depends on how you use precise MEA. For Gilgalad I was scaling bin size by the MEA So I think that the buggy / random MEA added noise to the GF's. Another interesting point is that moving ahead 0.5 GF and then back 0.5 GF won't always end at zero because the wall smoothing may make the 0.5 GF much closer to GF zero than -0.5 is. However, that is a problem no matter how you calculate your GF's. I haven't given it detailed thought, but I think that as long as the enemy is making enough random and independent movement decisions between when you fire and when the wave breaks, the [centeral limit theorem] proves that their movement porfile will still approximate the normal distribution (which is why I think bin smoothing makes sense). However, I am unsure whether having the GF's scale or not would allow better/faster learning.

If so-called "imprecise MEA" is shooting walls, then your segmentation is inadequate anyway I'd say. I can't say I've ever seen RougeDC's gun (Also, the 5th place Scarlet in the rumble) shooting the walls, yet it just uses classical MEA. Now, I'm not saying so-called "Precise MEA" is pointless, because it can allow you to have a fast-learning gun omit wall segments (or give them lower weight), but it CAN actually have caveats worth paying attention to:

1. The algorithms most people use for it are not perfect, and may underestimate how far robots can move by a small amount. Usually, this is not a big deal because the imprecision is smaller than half-botwidth and the vast majority of guns aim for the center of the enemy, but theoretically it could cause some distortion.
   I've never seen it implemented before, but a targeting system could account for the fact that at the it never needs to aim beyond the GF of "MEA - botwidth/2 + tiny_amount", and thus improve hitrate near the edges. This is risky thought, because if your "precise" MEA and botwidth calculations are not significantly more precise than is typical you risk an enemy being able to take advantage of this and avoid being hit.
2. If a bot uses the so-called "precise MEA" for scaling it's guessfactors (as opposed to just cropping), while it may sometimes learn faster due to being able to omit wall segments, BUT as the data collected increases, it may become less precise because it relies on an assumption about how enemies react to walls, which may not be entirely accurate.