Hypothesis under test: the selector chatters (~54 switches/100 ticks) and that
chatter suppresses firing, so committing to the virtual-best gun should raise
real hit rate. MEASURED AGAINST THE REAL DRUSSGT: it does not.
setting switches/100t real hit % dmg/run shots/run
no hysteresis 0/0 54.29 7.02% 217 244.8
light 10/0.05 1.95 6.22% 191 235.3
moderate 30/0.15 1.33 5.10% 156 233.9
aggressive 60/0.30 - 5.72% 175 242.5
(16 runs x 7 rounds per config except aggressive = 8; server-side events
sidecar; permutation test baseline-vs-moderate p=0.002, baseline-vs-light
p=0.18.)
Hysteresis cuts chatter 28-54x but every variant fires slightly FEWER shots and
deals LESS damage than baseline. Mechanism [INFERRED, consistent with
docs/gun_rack_analysis.md 2/4]: the per-tick random tie-break among the tied
band is a hedge, and hysteresis destroys it by committing to the virtual-best
gun - which is not the real-best, because the virtual metric is a weak,
sign-unstable ranker. The chattering was load-bearing.
Shipped: GunDwellTicks=10, GunSwitchMargin=0.05 (GUN_SELECTOR_DWELL /
GUN_SELECTOR_MARGIN) - the only setting within the baseline's run-to-run spread.
GUN_SELECTOR_DWELL=0 GUN_SELECTOR_MARGIN=0 reproduces the pre-change selector
exactly.
Seam: VirtualTracker, which already owns the other selection state (fitness,
the relative floor's peakRateRef), so the bot needs no new fields. bestGun and
chooseFromFit stay pure/memoryless, which is why the existing random-tiebreak
test needed no change.
Guards: test_gun_harness 39/39 (33 original + 6 new hysteresis checks),
test_vbullet_metric, test_power_selection, acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12.
Measured, not assumed. With the gate temporarily opened to 20 deg, every
real shot was logged (tick, angle error at fire time, distance, power,
hit) across 3 gauntlets: 2611 shots, 57.3% aggregate. Findings:
- The geometric cone atan(BotRadius/d) is directionally confirmed but a
WEAK lever: even at 0.0-0.1 deg error the hit rate at 400-600px is only
~53-57%, because PREDICTION error dominates alignment error.
- Real effect of tightening the gate: 57.9% -> 68.0% aggregate hit rate
(fixed 0.1 deg), not the 76.9% previously reported -- that was a
high-variance draw (per-rep 62.8/66.4/77.2%).
- The shipped range-aware gate (SafetyFactor 0.6) does NOT beat the fixed
2.0 deg gate on hit rate (55.8% vs 57.9%, ~1.5 sigma, inside noise). It
fires 22-28% more shots and therefore lands more total hits (~509 vs
~434 per rep). No per-adversary score delta exceeded the 300-point
run-to-run noise band, so no config is demonstrably better on score.
Shipped anyway because it is strictly more expressive (a fixed threshold is
the special case), tunable from one const, and physically motivated, but
the honest verdict is recorded in-code: the gate is not the bottleneck.
AimThresholdDeg is removed; shouldFire now takes distPx. Degenerate or NaN
distance falls back to the ceiling rather than dividing by zero.
Also adds a per-shot logger to ModularBot behind 'const ShotLog' so the
measurement above is reproducible, and 10 new guard checks (24 total, all
passing) covering monotonicity, clamping, formula, perfect alignment,
gross misalignment and degenerate distance.
Cross-checked against the server source: the gun fires BEFORE the turn is
applied, so the logged angle error is the true departure error, and
fireAssist auto-aim is off (unset by the Nim API and forced false by
setAdjustRadarForGunTurn).
SirStone