The classic captures were OPEN-LOOP: replayed DrussGT never dodged OUR
bullets. These come from real TR battles through the working Java bridge, so
the recording contains genuine reactions to ModularBot's live fire. The
open-loop caveat is gone (perfect-information remains).
PRIMARY RESULT - the boss beats us badly. DrussGT 1447 - ModularBot 300 over
15 rounds, ModularBot winning only round 5 (DrussGT died at tick 1893). Rounds
are long, not truncated: mean 1335 ticks, ModularBot got off 1134 shots.
ModularBot 1134 shots / 60 hits = 5.3% real hit rate
DrussGT 1400 shots / 169 hits = 12.1% real hit rate
So DrussGT's gun is ~2.3x more accurate than our entire rack, on top of far
better movement. That is the number to move.
Also captured: shield-on variant (DrussGT 939-287, 9/10 - ModularBot takes
round 1 to the known shield warm-up), and vs SpinBot 1175-0, Crazy 1080-1,
Corners 1659-0. 20,026 + 12,629 + 10,824 + 11,507 + 2,575 ticks.
Movement statistics match the classic set within ~0.04 on the perpendicular
and radial fractions, so this is the same wave surfer in TR physics:
TR vs modularbot: perp 0.967, radial 0.001, 52.8% at full speed,
reversing 46.3%, median range 464 px.
CLOSED LOOP PROVEN, not asserted. ModularBot's fire is a heat-limited near
metronome (median interval 14 ticks), which gives a usable exogenous clock:
- event-locked |delta heading| oscillates 0.96 -> 2.69 deg about a 1.47 deg
mean with the fire period, almost every lag outside the 95% band of a
400-iteration phase-shuffled null;
- cross-correlation of |delta heading| against the fire impulse peaks at
r = +0.111, lag 12 ticks, permutation p = 0.005 (null peak mean +0.016);
- OWN-FIRE CONTROL is flat, so the oscillation is enemy-driven rather than
an internal cadence;
- range response is weak (~3 px over 30 ticks, near noise) and is therefore
NOT claimed, and per-bullet dodging is not claimed either because the
bullet detector (shield) is off.
CAVEATS: still perfect-information (observer gives true positions every tick,
unlike the live bot's stale between-scan WorldState) so these remain optimistic
vs live play; and they are open-loop AT REPLAY TIME - 'closed_loop' describes
the capture, not a later replay. TR conversion residual is ~1.5 deg mean
because the TR server moves along the pre-turn heading, vs 0.000 deg for the
classic captures.
Adds analyze_closed_loop.py (PSTH event-locking, phase-shuffle permutation
null, cross-correlation, own-fire control) and per-round result sidecars.
There are no genuinely competitive adversaries for Tank Royale, and the
in-repo ones were broken until recently. Classic Robocode 1.9.5.5 is
obtainable (SourceForge, 20.4 MB) and its programmatic control API
(robocode.control.RobocodeEngine + BattleAdaptor.onTurnEnded) can run real
battles headless and expose per-turn robot state. So a legacy leader bot's
MOVEMENT can be captured and used as a gun-testing fixture with no port.
Captured unmodified DrussGT 3.1.4159 vs spinbot/ramfire/crazy/corners and a
mirror match: 28,797 ticks, plus two trivial-bot contrasts. Conversion to
the Tank Royale convention is validated to 0.000-0.001 deg by recomputing
the direction implied by (heading, speed) and comparing it against the
recorded per-tick displacement -- i.e. the data is proven to be genuine
recorded motion rather than a mangled export. (A first attempt treated the
snapshot API's headings as degrees; they are radians, ~95 deg off.)
The statistics confirm it is really a wave surfer: perpendicular to the
opponent 65-96% of ticks, radial ~0.001, 41-72% of ticks at full speed,
reversing on 42-46% of ticks, holding range at a 283-526 px median. The
straight-line contrast is radial-dominant (0.75) with ZERO reversals.
Discovery: DrussGT detects predictable guns and switches to a bullet-shield
stand-still mode, so captures against sample.Walls/TrackFire had to be
rejected as non-movement.
CAVEATS, recorded in DRUSSGT_FIXTURES.md: these are open-loop (replayed
DrussGT never dodges OUR bullets) and perfect-information (the observer
gives true positions every tick, unlike our stale live WorldState). Both
make our guns look better than in live play, so use them for RELATIVE gun
ranking, not absolute hit rates.
Jars stay out of git; capture tooling is reproducible via capture.sh.
SirStone