Virtual Gun array settings?

I've been thinking about that for ages — Is it better to use guns with similar attributes & weights but different decay rate, or guns with very different settings?

I was using the former in 0.012m7, then tried some very different weights in main gun in 0.012m8.

What's very interesting is that with main gun only, the performance is increased (comparing 0.012m8.1 with 0.012l29) after more battles, the performance decreased considerably ;)

But when put into VG array, the better gun results in considerably decreased performance (comparing 0.012m8 with 0.012m7)

What I'm experiencing is that, two strong guns, when combined, resulting worse performance — and the improvement of one of them is making the combination even worse ;)

Note that my VG is selecting the best gun based on normalized total hit rate, without any decay.

This discussion about CC VG may help, though I've never experimented with it since I have other things to improve besides my VG. Link

Intuitively when you put two similar guns, it's hard for the VG to actually differentiate between the two. On the other hand, when you have two totally different guns against a learner, you are on the case that when you are scoring your secondary gun, he is actually reacting to your primary gun, and if they are really different the hit rate may not be so meaningful.

Anyway, most of the top bots today use a simple VG array based on hit rate, so their authors must have experimented more with the weighting schemes than with the strategy of picking the best gun.

Virtual guns against a surfer is nasty business, since your gun learns a movement that will change once the VG enables it. I tried to keep my VG array to a minimum, and instead focus on making 2 really good guns, plus a random gun for future proofing.