WaveSurfing rethink

Even though I have a bot that used to rank relatively high in the 1v1 division, I couldn’t think of myself fully understanding what I was doing and why it works. I was always assuming some GF targeting which fires at the most frequently visited gf, with the most popular attributes in mind. (e.g. segmenting on lateral velocity, accel, wall distance, etc. ).

And even though I tried to consider more types of enemy targeting strategies later, I was still assuming some specific targeting strategy.

But today, after thinking about all that in dreams, an idea just came up.

Can we just don’t assume anything about enemy strategy? Be tough yourself, and they’ll automagically have some trouble hitting you.

But that’s not enough for a top movement. Besides not showing weakness in all senses, it’ll be pity if you lose the chance to be better dodging them.

Statistics will always tell you the truth — once you are sure that they always fire head-on in some situations, why don’t you try your best to make them see the same situation again when aiming? Yes, I’m talking about automagical stop&go, but in my observation far more guns have similar weakness.

Besides firing situations, when you are sure about that they are very likely to fire bullets they’ve fired before, downgrading to traditional wave surfing seems good. And for else, why risk dodging somewhere they aren’t firing at? If their targeting looks quite random (at given firing situation), sitting still or moving randomly are also good choices. And you won’t risk hitting the wall or get yourself stuck somewhere as well if you don’t move at all.

For every bit of the future you can predict, you can always know what you can do better. A lot of bots are too strict, imo, following the design (and the assumptions behind) strictly. But I think we can do better, give more freedom to the bot itself (who always knows the situation better), rather than planning everything in advance. Given the success in GF targeting and then kNN, I’m pretty sure there are still a lot to explore even in today, and there are still a lot for bots to improve.

I tried something like this in DrussGt 2.6.0, and debugged it until about 2.8.0 when I finally gave up on it. I've had some ideas since then that might help, but at least in a wavesurfing-style framework I was never able to get it to work. Maybe it requires looking further ahead than I did (I only did one wave), or maybe more penalty for entering unexplored parameter space, but I never managed to get any benefit from it.

Give it a try though, if you prove me wrong and find some value behind it I might just have to dust off DrussGT ;-)

It really helps actually. I once made a bot that always stopped before enemy fired so the enemy always saw the same situation. The problem was that it decreased my MEA a lot but it would be really good if you tried. I have the same thoughts but toooo lazy to do it.

I don't know if I fully undestood your thoughts, but specifically about the auto stop &go thing: I thought of something like that sometime before and it seemed like an amazing think. Most of the guns today are really predictable, and those which are less predictable are just being differently obvious at each situation. The data we have gives us statistical clues of situations the enemies are more obvious. What if besides moving into safer regions we take into account our gun heat tracking and put our enemy into a obvious situation when it is firing. Of course this takes a lot of prediction capabilities because we dont know where the enemy will be next, and different implementations of this idea can lead to very different results. So I think that even if it was already tried before, it is worth another shot.

I've come up with that exactly when I thought about stop&go and why it is good. Its not only about giving no clue of where are you moving to, but mainly about being over and over at a situation where most of the enemies will be kinda obvious. But we do that because we know it. Let's just let our stats decide which situation is that for us :)

The only thing I see here is that, well, getting to a safe place is fairly easy given robocodo physics. But being at a safe place when the wave breaks AND at a obvious situation at the same time with too litle reaction time is harder, besides requiring a more complex type of GoTo movement to cover enough possibilities... so yeah, it's perfect theoretically but really hard to work in practice, but Ill definitely try that in the future