Well you write something about this bot?

Just noticed that DeepThought ascended to top 10 and ranks 5th in survival, congratulations! And from debug graphics I see that it uses true surfing & bullet shadow + one gun. Anything more to say about that? I'm quite curious now ;)

It is a test bot I think. I saw three different DeepThoughts and first thing I thought was that it was using Neural Networks.

Yes, DeepThought is my test bot. It is almost identical to Firestarter, with the same movement and energy management, but with a different gun. I was doing some experiments with different learning algorithms. KNN is used by most top bots now, but who knows, maybe it is not the best algorithm? :)

First, I tried Decision Trees and Random Forests. Random Forests are a very good tool for many machine learning tasks and they often perform better than KNN. The problem is that they are computationally expensive, and I wasn't able to implement them well without skipping too many turns.

Next, I tried Deep Learning, which also takes a lot of computational power. DeepThought had two hidden layers initially but I had to reduce it to one hidden layer. It is still a bit slow now and it skips turns sometimes. It is nice to see that it got into the top 10. Now I can say that DeepThought is the strongest deep learning bot :) but actually the gun isn't very good and the strength comes from Firestarter's movement and energy management. That's why I didn't plan to write anything about this bot, and I will probably retire him or replace the deep learning with an other algorithm.

I am still amazed how Gaff has such a strong neural network gun (#1 in Targeting Challenge 2K7/Fast Learning Results). With a better movement, it could be the best bot.