Sweeping Changes

While it isn't my robot to criticize, but I found making to many changes at once can be dangerous. As you cannot be sure what influenced your score.

It actually should be obvious, but until it bites you enough...

Thanks. I considered tweaking just one thing at a time, but I figured that since all the changes shared the same purpose (making the bot more cautious and conservative), they would have similar effects.

Well it doesn't always work exactly the way you expect. :)

But as I said, not my robot, just a bit of unasked for advice.

I don't mind advice. Skilgannon and I are having all our developmental discussions on a public wiki after all. If you ever see something that should be pointed-out, then please, go ahead and point it out.

Updating one thing at a time between submits to the rumble helps you track the effect of each improvement separately. The final result is sometimes different from small scale test beds.

At the same time, multiple improvements which only work together might never make it to the rumble.

For example:

- Wave surfing/Precise Prediction without a strong danger function is inferior to shrapnel dodging.

- Advanced dodging and targeting in melee sometimes don´t work because of weak melee radar.

- Adding more classifiers to k-NN search not working due to bad tuning.

- Fixing a Performance Enhancing Bug hurts the score unless you combine another improvement to take advantage of the fix.