Awesome enty

This new bot of yours really is awesome ! It is really beating the hell out of the topbots, even without BulletShielding.

Alas I am not able to run any battles for it, as I am still on Java 8.

Thanks! I will make it Java 8 compatible for the next release.

Just wanted to add to this thread, this robot truly is a beast! Congratulations on 100% PWIN!

alas, in version 0.11, still some parts are not Java 8 compatible: kc/mega/game/Battleffield has been compiled by version 57.0.
Does not matter that much, I am just not able (currently) to run any battles for it. Same for Raven as it has been compiled by version 55.0.

Oops, I will have another go at fixing it for my next release!

I've downloaded Java 13, I can now run battles for BeepBoop. After rebuilding the robot-database, also Raven and WaveShark run fine. Note that for my development I will still use the compiler option '-source 1.8'

Ok, great! I compiled 0.11 with --release 8, but I think it didn't work because there were some old .class files lying around that didn't get overridden.

Oh wow, missed this! Awesome work Kev, you have a history of popping up with surprise entries =)

I'd be curious to know more about the Tensorflow work you did to make the KNN features...

Thanks! I wrote a brief description under BeepBoop/Understanding_BeepBoop, but I'll release the code too once I get it cleaned up.

Aha, I missed the last section. Surprised there wasn't more to gain from some kind of deeper embedding model.

Me too, and I'll maybe revisit it at some point. Theoretically a deeper embedding model could learn feature interactions like "wall-ahead is more important when velocity is 8 than when it is 0"

I’m surprised as well. Btw, how many layers are you using in the deeper model? And is that fully connected? I guess some deeper models with explicit feature interactions may work better in robocode scenario, given high noise. I would try things like Deep&Cross, DeepFM, etc.

I tried a few (pretty simple) variants:

• Multiplying the features by a weight matrix. One nice feature of this is that a diagonal matrix recovers standard feature weighting, so this model should be strictly better than per-feature weights.
• A one-hidden-layer feedforward network.
• Summing up the embeddings from the above two.

I totally agree that allowing multiplicative feature interactions as you suggest should work better though!

It's possible that the KNN already takes that into account sufficiently. Maybe if you bump the cluster size up a lot, and change the kernel width for cluster weighting, it might force this part of the learning into the NN instead?

It feels like some cascade model (widely used in ads & recommendation), by putting one deep model on top of some simple & very fast model, with the input of the former being the output of the latter. This architecture simplifies computation by magnitude of degrees, but also restricted the power of the deep model. A best practice then is to make the simple model fitting the output of the deep one, and retrain deep model on top of new input, and repeat...

I tend to think it's right that the KNN would take such relationships of features into account in a sense, but as a statistical model what it cannot do is generalize, which increases the number of data points needed to effectively cover some areas of the input space. In many ways, for this sort of usage, I would conceptualize the potential advantage of a deep embedding not as learning the feature interactions themselves, so much as learning the generalized contour of when to de-weight features, as a noise filter of sorts. This is a bit of a tangent, but thinking of in in terms of being like a noise filter, and also considering things like BeepBoop's velocity randomization, I also start to wonder if there could be some value in including not just the present feature values as inputs to deep embeddings, but including several ticks worth of feature history. Let the embedding learning have the potential to construct it's own temporally filtered (or rate of change) features.

Including several ticks of history seems like a nice way of removing the need for hand-crafted features like acceleration, time-since-velocity-change, distance-last-k-ticks, etc., and having the model learn them instead. Maybe a good model could even learn some PM-like behaviors.

Definitely a weakness of KNNs is generalization to new parts of the input space. I did think a bit about pre-training a model against a lot of bots and then quickly adapting it to the current opponent (maybe using meta-learning methods) so it would generalize better early in the match before it gets lots of data. On the other hand, aiming models get a lot of data pretty quickly, so I'm not sure of how much of an issue poor generalization really is.

I would say it probably depends what you're targeting. When targeting a strong surfer, I would say there's potentially a lot of value in maximizing the utility of data learned since the surfer last got information from collisions, and so that's a scenario where generalizing seems potentially more important in my eyes.

(unless it's going 100% flattener, in which case I would say the value is adapting on time scales that are simply different from what it's flattening over, either learning faster the flattener, or learning long-term "history repeating itself" trends/patterns that it loses sight of)

Also some deep enough model can learn how surfers (without flattening) "surf" hits, just like networks like "Deep Interest Network" used in CTR. However our current use of KNN allows nothing like this. Maybe some end-to-end approach exists for robocode scenario.

Yeah, very cool to see! Congrats from me, too! And I'm enjoying reading about it.

Hey Voidious, long time no see! Glad you enjoyed reading about it, I learned a lot from Diamond's code while developing BeepBoop.