Future Gunheat Waves & active bullet shadowing
About active bullet shielding, I'm quite interested in that you sample candidate angles from the aimer's distribution.
I've been long thinking about improving anti-surfing guns by adding true entropy this way (it works well for non-adaptive guns against surfers, but no effect yet for the anti-adaptive gun). So I'm quite curious about whether sampling itself (without the scoring of creating a good bullet shadow), instead of always firing at the max works on its own against top surfers in BeepBoop.
I did try that out a while ago before I implemented active shadowing. Yes, sampling instead of taking the argmax guess factor for the anti-surfer gun slightly improved scores in battles of BeepBoop vs itself. However, I didn't include it in a released version because scores dropped against weaker surfers, so the change didn't improve APS.
And with active bullet shadowing scoring, weak surfers make BeepBoop firing at max angles since their guns aren’t strong enough, while the strongest surfers with the strongest guns makes BeepBoop firing at sampled angles, improving both targeting performance and bullet shadow.
If my assumptions are correct, we should notice improvements in hit rate in targeting, and decreased hit rate in surfing at the same time against the strongest bots.