Awesome enty
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)
