PowerHouse

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What's special about it?

It is my first bot to get to the top 20. I guess that's special.

Great, I want to try it. Where can I download it?

[Version 1.7c7]

How competitive is it?

It's fairly competitive, it made me a member of The2000Club. See History for some accomplishments.

How does it move?

It uses my own implementation of WaveSurfing right now.

How does it fire?

It uses a GuessFactor gun at the moment.

How does it dodge bullets?

WaveSurfing

How does the melee strategy differ from one-on-one strategy?

I have no idea what it would do in melee. It is exclusively for one-on-one. Although I have been giving some thought to adding melee capabilities soon.

What does it save between rounds and matches?

It saves everything between rounds, and nothing between matches.

Can I use your code?

Version 1.3s is released under the RWPCL. However, later versions are not open source right now.

What's next for your robot?

Break the 2k mark of course! DONE! (2-21-06) Get into the top 10!

Does it have any WhiteWhales?

There are some PM guns that give it some trouble, especially the cx.* bots.

What other robot(s) is it based on?

The GuessFactor gun is loosly based on Stampede2's gun.

Chat

1.5g8.1 is mostly an experiment. I increased the preferred distance by quite a bit. It looked like it helped against many of the mid-range bots in my testing, but i'm skeptical that it will yeild any real rating boost. --wcsv

I feel like I'm always playing with distancing... For Komarious, it made a huge difference in rating to make her stay further away, but in Dookious it doesn't seem to make a huge difference any more. (Although the PL score suffers the further away he stays, generally.) I still think you should try tossing in the Bee gun and posting a test version with that - it could be that your gun is holding you back or something, and doing that really helped me sometimes to know whether I should be working on gun or movement. -- Voidious

I probably should do that soon. I have to catch a flight soon and won't be back till next week, so not till then anyway... --wcsv

I was looking through my wavesurfing code and noticed a line that is supposed to be commented out that wasn't. The surfing was probably going berserk sometimes in 1.5g8.1, so I'm hoping 1.5g8.2 at least gets back up to pre source code loss levels. --wcsv

I'm sure it's a fluke, but it's kinda cool to be Shadow 3.66d's only loss at the moment. --wcsv

I noticed that too, great work... With Shadow, even a "fluke" victory is something to be proud of. I can't remember the last time I saw Dookious defeat Shadow in a single battle. (It's pretty close to the top of my "Action Item List", though =))

I really have very little idea of what version DS1.0 will do in the rumble. I've been working on an idea for a new gun for a while on the side, and I really wanted to see how it would work in the rumble, so I plugged it into PowerHouse for a live test. It still needs a lot of tuning, but my testing so far shows some interesting results. --wcsv

I have to ask - what is "DS"? DynamicSegmentation?? -- Voidious

Yeah that's right, I couldn't think of a good name for what it does. Probably something like Closest Match Segmentation is a better description. The idea is to always be able to find the closest match to a given set of segments when you have no data for that set. I'll post a better description of it later when I have more time. It looks like it's back to the gun lab for this one for now (As I said, it needs a lot of tuning). I'll let it get a bit closer to 1k battles, then pull it. --wcsv

So before a couple versions ago, was your gun considering GF1 to always be clockwise? Seems like you'd have a *lot* of points left in your gun if that was the case. (Well, looks like you already found some of those points...)

But the main point of this comment was that I'd advise you to not focus too much on the "weakening" against surfers while you're trying to improve your gun. As PEZ has been saying for a while, buggy targeting and surfing can work surprisingly well against WaveSurfers. Also, I have seen pretty wild fluctuations in my gun's power against surfers when I am making changes that I think will have little or no effect on that aspect of it. And lastly, surfers are a very tough group to generalize, each of them having unique implementations, segmentations, etc. In the end, I think having a separate AntiSurfer gun (with fast rolling and/or low segmentation) is really the way to go, but opinions vary widely on that point =)

-- Voidious

Actually it did always consider GF1 to be clockwise, and i never really thought about it until a few days ago. (My surfing still does in fact, but I'll change that soon). About having a separate gun for surfers, the restructuring that i mentioned on the history page is in preparation for putting my VG system back in. I released 1.7a mostly because I wanted to make sure that I hadn't broken my current gun by doing so. --wcsv

Well, you got into the top-10, pushing Pear out. Do you retire now? ;-) Congrats on this achievement! -- GrubbmGait

Yeah, big congrats from me too! After being stuck right around 2K for a while, you're really on a roll with these last few versions. (Knock on wood. =)) Keep it up dude. -- Voidious

Thanks guys! I was really stuck for a while and nothing I did was helping at all, so I finally decided to do a nearly a full rewrite. As of a few versions ago it's almost a new bot entirely. The basic structure is still the same, but I rewrote the gun and movement from scratch. Apparently I did something right, because i'm really happy with the results. @Grubb: No way i'll retire! I can't quit now! --wcsv

I think shortly after passing 2050 with Dookious, I mentioned to PEZ how I'd previously thought I would be "satisfied" once my rating got that high, and maybe take a break, but it turns out that it only increased my addiction. He was like, "I could've told you that." =) -- Voidious

Early indications are that i've totally butchered it again in 1.7c6... --wcsv

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