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I'm on a 3 year old MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz, so I feel your testing pain. =) But I just ordered a Core i7 box, so not for long. =) Though I've come to accept that no amount of CPU power is enough to satisfy a Robocoder's appetite.

I feel like when I focus on tweaks, I just lose my mind and never have any real insights. I just feel like every minute that my CPU isn't running some Robocode benchmark is wasted, so I just keep thinking of the next thing to fiddle with and run the next test. There's a place for that if you have a good idea something could be improved, but it also clouds my mind and keeps my focus away from the bigger picture. I'm sure you do have lots of little things to tweak in Tomcat, but I bet you also have some significant bugs and feature gaps. Do you do Gun Heat Waves and precise intersection in the surfing? Do your implementations actually help? I think I gained about 0.3 APS from each of those.

Maybe you can attach Diamond's gun for a hybrid bot test and see how much of the difference is in gun vs movement? It should be pretty easy to plug in. Might just need to be careful to make Bullet Shadows still work, but it's a pretty simple interface.

I do not know much about hardware, but i think, that my i3 with 1.3 GH is much more worse:)

Tomcat uses gun heat waves. It's not completly clear for me how precise intersection can help in surfing. Actually Tomcat starts to surf next wave, when closest wave in distance of two ticks to Tomcats center. But thanks, i will add it to todo list:) I'm not sure, but it seems, that Tomcat was released with gun heat waves, and some tuning of it give him some points.

Thanks, for Diamond's gun but I'd rather spend time to Tomcat development - i have the super secret big idea which must hit:) I hope, it must hit:)

I've always found it optimal to surf until the wave is one tick from center. Effectively, this is when it passes your center, since it will move and then check for collisions before you can move again. While there still could be firing angles that would hit you after this, most of them would have already hit you, so it makes sense.

I guess you're just using the firing angle on the last tick you surf that wave? Of all the firing angles that would hit your bot for that movement option, using precise intersection will let you use the angle at the center of that range as the input to your danger calculation. (Or the whole range, depending on how your danger formula stuff works.) I was surprised by how much I gained by it. Pretty sure I argued against it having value for a while before I tried it. =))

I cannot understand yours point because of my english skill or simple misunderstanding. Currently Tomcat uses this algorithm (in roughly):

• predict movement in CW and CCW directions until closest's wave travel time > 0
• for each point calculate it's danger as: (amount of possible bullets within +/-botWidthInRadians * 0.75) * (high danger) + (amount of possible bullets within +/-botWidthInRadians * 2.25) * (low danger danger) (distance in radians between point and bullet bearing offset is also taken in account, botWidthInRadians are calculated exactly)
• move in direction with safet position or if distance to safest point <= stop distance, then go there directly (yes, i know that it's my not good bicycle and it's another reason of birth of ConceptA:) )

Where i can add precise intersection? May be it can be applied only for true surfing? Are you know is DrussGT use it in movement?

DrussGT doesn't use precise intersection, but it would work and is something I've been contemplating adding. I'm just worried that it would be very slow.