Survival and the PL

Yeah, what a pleasant surprise - I was going for APS. =) This was a .09 improvement over 3000 battles (6 seasons x 500 bots) in tests, so I was sure it would translate to the rumble. But I guess it really did hurt against th really weak bots I excluded from this test bed, which surprises me.

A few weeks ago I tried to find some really scientific bullet power selection. My thinking was that in general, if survival is not a worry, you want to maximize bullet damage - do as much damage as fast as possible, to increase your bulle damage and give him the least amount of time to get his own. But if survival is a concern, you want to maximize energy differential. So I plugged all this in to my normalized hit rates, expected rate of return for both of those, and trying to figure out when to switch between them.

Turns out maximizing bullet damage = 3.0, maximizing energy differential = 0.1, in almost every situation against almost every bot. Like you're literally best off just not firing to maximize energy differential unless your accuracy is super high. It didn't work very well. I think ~2.0 works because it's only slightly below 3.0 in damage rate, while also much better in hedging over more shots for consistent survival, and gun accuracy is better if you stick to a more consistent bullet power in data collection. But I'm not really sure. I'd still like something more intelligent than a hand crafted formula, but for now I'm skeptical about really making that work.