WaveSurfing rethink

I agree that there are many more possibilities in wave surfing and GF targeting that people didn't think of yet. This is what makes Robocode still so interesting, even though, when I look at top bots, I often marvel at how amazingly good they are :)

If a bot is already very strong and we want to make it better, it mostly boils down to reverse engineering. How well can we understand the enemy bot and therefore exploit his learning behavior?

Yes, a lot of work resembles reverse engineering — but even we know their code, we can still have some trouble knowing their behavior (have a look at the open sourced top bots ;) )

So instead of come up with an idea about a specific opponent, why don’t we build a system that does “reverse engineering” automagically? Since what a bot can do is limited, a lot of the knowledge about the opponent is wasted — but what if we reverse the direction, starting from what our bot can do, and see whether the opponent has some weakness respectively?

Even if you reverse engineer a bot, there is always randomness. HawkOnFire is well understood bot, but even top bots get only around 30% hit probability. Even Walls is not that predictable unless you really fine tune for its specific algorithm.

Once we have randomness, the best you can do is to collect statistic. Which is rather unfortunate.