Welcome to MeleeRumble! :-)

Nice entrance! Excited to see where this goes. :-)

Now that you're further along, what's your current view on the potential of Melee surfing? Do you think you can effectively dodge simple targeters beyond HOT, or simple learning guns, or even good learning guns? It seems that you and a couple others have proven you can dodge HOT fairly well in Melee...

Of course, there's also the question of whether it's worth it, for what you may sacrifice in good positioning. But that could take a long time to answer.

First off, I'm not purely surfing. I'm doing a minimum-risk movement which has a weighting of wave dangers as well as position dangers, so hopefully my wave dangers don't cause too much of a problem with the positioning, avoiding being targeted etc. If nothing else, hopefully it will take the least dangerous position that doesn't let me be hit by the wave.

As for the potential, from what I've seen the limitation is how much information can be gathered. I'm surfing every bullet fired at every bot by every bot, so theoretically, if I can see all of the waves, I can dodge all of the bullets. I'm not doing energy-bonuses for hits, bactracking chains of energy drops or anything like that, and given the big scan gaps that means I'm missing a lot of the bullet firings. I think there is still a lot of performance that can be eked out of the movement, tracking and weighting still, although it will have to become much much much more complex. I'm not sure if what I envision will successfully run without skipping turns; certainly not without being quite a slowbot. But then, compare any 1v1 surfing movement to a decent 1v1 random movement and the same parallels and trade-offs are also made.

As I said earlier, the cap is the stats gathering. I am simultaneously learning every bot's targeting preferences against each of its opponents, so there is a lot of info that needs to be acquired, and given the big scan gaps, not much data to go on. This will be improved slightly once I get the energy tracking due to more waves being fired, but remains what I think is the main limitation against complex targeters. I don't think it will ever get to a point where it is useful, for example, to add a flattener just against the stats of certain bots but not others. On the other hand, I do think it gives the best possible potential for dodging complex targeters that we're going to get. Anti-gravity-with-perpendicularity type minimum risk movement certainly isn't going to be less predictable, and that is essentially the state of the art when it comes to melee right now.

My feeling from watching matches is that this works extremely well towards the endgame, when there are 5 or less bots on the field. In the beginning it is often too crowded to successfully surf without becoming an easy target, but once there is a bit of space this movement really comes into its own.

Interpolation may help guess what is happening between scans.

Congradulations! I'm eager to reinstal robocode and watch Neuromancer in action! :) Reguarding your 5 bot or less comment: I wonder; Are you effectively doing (minimumRisk*waveRisk = totalRisk), or some sort of wieghted addition instead ? "Limited and sh@#ty info" - Yep, Welcome to MeleeRumble ! :D -Jlm0924

I'm doing an addition, since I don't think the two risks are interdependent. Currently I'm normalising each of them with respect to the median dangers and then doing danger = 3*waveDanger + 1*positionDanger.

Right now I'm just scratching my head as to how I can get better/more information, and besides hardcoding lots of cases of 'they fired once and were hit twice', 'they fired once and were hit 3 times', 'they didn't fire but were hit twice', 'they didn't fire but were hit 3 times' etc I don't know where that info is going to come from.

I'm still just dealing with regular old 1-tick-wide waves, which does need to change, but that can wait for some gun improvements.