what's the secret to making a good robot in robocode

Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Tmservo
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Ok, any movement which scales with BFT works with GF. But which movements are these?

- Orbital movement

- Random movement normalized to move to all reachable angles (random orbital movement)

It doesn't work as well on other movements(slower learning):

- Pattern movement (including linear movement and oscillators)

- Random movements, which change heading/velocity based on anything not related to MEA

In practice, GF works against all movements above, but thanks to segmentation. Segmenting by distance and bullet power fixes most assumptions in GF which happen to be wrong in the long run.

Assuming wrongly that a movement is orbital is not that bad. Movements which do not try to maximize MEA are more predictable in the long run. If it is orbital, GF is right from the beginning and do well. If it is not orbital, then any statistical gun will have a higher hit rate in the long run.

And a worst case scenario. What if someone uses a pattern movement in the beginning and switches to orbital later on? DrussGT is doing this since it incorporated EnergyDome's bullet shielding.

MN (talk)16:02, 19 December 2013