bd57db6d63c555526c5012622f72fefa33787f4b
385 Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 SirStone
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b0654d18eb |
TM verdict, settled: it loses LIVE and sits at/below its majority class - (c)
The user pushed back on "the TM can't be your best 1v1 gun", correctly, because two
decisive tests had never been run. Both are now run and they agree.
TASK 1 - THE GF HEAD vs ITS MAJORITY-CLASS BASELINE (offline, n=1,751,067):
label histogram [254286, 284578, 678879, 297055, 236269]
majority class = 2 (the CENTRE bucket) = 38.77%
RAW head accuracy = 36.69% -> margin **-2.08 pp, BELOW majority**
GATED head accuracy = 40.37% vs 38.75% majority -> +1.62 pp, BUT it predicts the
majority class on 62.4% of ticks and its minority recall is 13.6% / 12.9% - a
base-rate predictor wearing a classifier's clothes.
Shuffled control sits at its own majority (20.04% vs 20.12%), confirming chance.
**THE OLD "46% vs 20% CHANCE" FIGURE I QUOTED WAS WRONG ON TWO COUNTS:** the
baseline is 38.8%, not 20%, and the 46% predated the deferred-label fix. Against
the correct baseline the head is BELOW it.
TASK 2 - THE FIRST-EVER LIVE A/B OF THE TM GUN (7 runs x 7 rounds per arm, one
frozen binary from git archive HEAD =
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SirStone
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eb74f9b2e3 |
Ram: finisher-only by default, and the bullet-rain abort now measures real energy
Follows the diagnosis that proactive straight-line ramming CANNOT work: both bots have MAX_SPEED=8, so a pursuit cannot catch an evading equal-speed opponent. Measured over 49 rounds per arm, opportunity -> contact was **0/6** (base), 0/40 (ring), 0/12 (ringhot). The only proactive conversion in the whole corpus came from a FINISHER, and only because a <20-energy DrussGT stops fleeing (that episode closed at 6-8 px/tick). Opportunity episodes never got below ~80px; one ran the full 60-tick duration cap and closed only 198->171px; a perfectly aligned full-speed one closed 195->114px then plateaued. CHANGES - **Finisher-only default.** `finisher` (<20 energy, dist<300, we are healthier) and the rare `desperation` (both <5, dist<150) are kept; `opportunity` and the speculative `plan` are OFF. Both are env-reenableable with no rebuild: `TR_RAM_OPPORTUNITY=1` (tune via TR_RAM_OPP_DIST/MARGIN) and `TR_RAM_PLAN=1`. Justification: it removes 100+ non-converting episodes per fixture at zero measured loss (oldram vs base was p=0.69, damage 279 vs 284, survival 17/49 vs 16/49) - and each of those episodes spent up to 60 ticks driving STRAIGHT at the enemy, abandoning the mover's dodging and disrupting aim. - **`desperation` KEPT** deliberately: it is cheap and rare, fires only when both bots are nearly dead at short range (a coin-flip where 0.6 contact can decide it), and it is not the refuted straight-line pursuit. - **THE BULLET-RAIN ABORT WAS DEAD CODE AND IS NOW FIXED.** `onHitByBullet` accumulated raw bullet FIREPOWER while `TR_RAM_ABORT_DMG = 0.5` was documented as a DAMAGE rate - so the bar was implicitly "sum of power > 7.5 over 15 turns" and the maximum rate ever observed was 0.27. It now accumulates REAL ENERGY via a `bulletDamage(power)` helper matching the server's `4p` / `6p-2` formula, and `TR_RAM_ABORT_DMG` defaults to **2.0 energy/turn** (~30 HP over 15 turns): "abort an in-progress ram if we take > 2.0 energy per turn". Same effective bar for normal firepower, and it can now actually fire - the live run reports `dmgRate=1.07/turn` where the old units said 0.27. - **`ramStuckTicks` REMOVED.** It required `dist < 5px`; contact occurs at ~36px (two 18px radii) and position rewind prevents getting closer, so it could never increment. Only the 60-tick duration cap can now self-end a ram. LIVENESS (measured, default config, vs a charging Java RamFire, 3 rounds): default -> `[ram] ON reason=finisher` x3, `reason=opportunity` x0 TR_RAM_OPPORTUNITY=1 -> `reason=opportunity` x4, `reason=finisher` x2 So the opportunity states DID occur and are suppressed by the new default - the removal is real, not an arm that never fires. A line also read `[ram] OFF reason=duration dmgRate=1.07/turn`, confirming the new energy units. Adds docs/ramming_negative_result.md (70 lines) recording the question, the five diagnostic answers, the geometric reason, the finisher exception, the two dead code paths, and an explicit "do not re-attempt a proactive straight-line ram; if point-blank forcing is ever wanted it is an INTERCEPTION/cornering movement problem" note - the same pattern that stopped the corpse bug recurring. Guards: test_ram_decision 40 (was 28), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_rack_membership 48, test_selector_tiebreak 19, test_tm_pattern_registration 20, test_vbullet_admit_gate 12, acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12. ModularBot compiles. Honest note: the abort-threshold fix is a real (tiny) behaviour change, NOT measured-neutral - it only bites while a finisher ram is under sustained fire, which is exactly the user's stated wish. The finisher-only removal itself is measured-neutral per the given A/B. |
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SirStone
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99f9532f55 |
Melee vs 1v1 racks: mechanism built, but NO gun-level payoff - do not split
The user's plan was separate melee and 1v1 racks. The mechanism is built and
committed (TR_RACK_<GUN>=both|1v1|melee|off, mode from server truth). This job
produced the missing evidence: each candidate gun forced ALONE in BOTH modes,
one frozen binary, env-only arms, exact two-sided permutation tests.
1v1 vs the real DrussGT (6 arms x 5 runs x 7 rounds):
Pattern 10.80% 292 dmg/run 11/35 round wins
KNN 5.58% 128 1/35
Linear 2.99% 59 0/35
Circular 2.89% 60 0/35
WallBounce 2.72% 57 0/35
GuessFactor 2.14% 38 0/35
-> every arm differs from Pattern at p=0.0079 (the 5v5 floor). Per-gun damage
span 7.7x. In 1v1 the gun matters ENORMOUSLY.
Melee (+DrussGT, RandomMover, WaveSurfer, OscillatorBot; enemyCount 4):
WallBounce 25.79% 643 dmg/run 7/25
Linear 24.88% 624 7/25
GuessFactor 24.48% 613 4/25
Pattern 24.39% 599 5/25
Circular 25.88% 596 5/25
KNN 23.87% 539 3/25
-> NO arm beats Pattern with significance (p=0.42-0.96, fully overlapping).
WallBounce's nominal +7.3% is p=0.42. Per-gun damage span only 1.19x.
THE FINDING: in 1v1 the gun matters enormously (7.7x spread); in melee it barely
matters (1.19x). Melee is won by movement, survival and placement, not by which
gun you carry - every candidate lands in the same ~24-26% band. So a separate
melee rack has NO gun-level payoff and DefaultRackMembership stays Pattern-only.
The mechanism remains available if it is ever wanted.
Honest caveats: the melee comparison is UNDER-POWERED at 5 runs (detecting the
~44-damage WallBounce-Pattern gap would need ~2.5-3x the runs), so "no significant
difference" is NOT "no difference"; the only candidate worth re-testing is
WallBounce in melee, and it must not be shipped on this evidence.
SHIM LIMITATION FOUND, worth recording: run_bridge_battle.sh captures with
`--subject DrussGT`, and the shim DROPS every tick once the subject dies - losing
5-20% of ModularBot's shots in melee. The campaign was re-run with
`--subject ModularBot` so ModularBot's events are complete (fires match gun_stats
realShots exactly). Any future melee evidence through this shim must do the same
or it will silently under-count.
Adds docs/melee_vs_1v1_racks.md. No repository source changed.
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SirStone
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bfdcdf8919 |
The three unmeasured features, A/B'd - and a methodology correction I had wrong
Five arms x 7 runs x 7 rounds (35 real-DrusGT battles, 8 concurrent), one frozen
binary from git archive HEAD at
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SirStone
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3142b70aa5 |
Gate virtual-bullet spawn on rack admission: +68% tick rate, selected gun unchanged
The default rack is now Pattern-only (
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SirStone
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185a32e9eb |
Radial offset: STRUCTURALLY incapable of helping, and Pattern does not overshoot
Follow-up to
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SirStone
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31c7c01d28 |
SHIPPED: the default rack is now Pattern-only (+49% hit rate, +66% damage on the boss)
`DefaultRackMembership` now admits Pattern (id 5) and marks all 14 other guns `rmOff`. **The selector mechanism is untouched** - `chooseFromFit`, the floor/band logic, the hysteresis and the virtual-fitness plumbing are all intact and functional. Only the rack membership changed, so this is reverted by env alone. Evidence (measured, replicated three times, 10 adversaries): Pattern alone gives 10.36% real hit rate / 264 damage per run vs the full rack's 6.93% / 159. Pattern significantly wins on DrussGT, Corners, Crazy and PatternMover, ties on three, and the full rack never significantly beats it on ANY adversary. Mechanism: the virtual signal keeps ranking the wrong guns first (HeadOn 46% of ticks at 2.0% real; Linear 57.7% at 6.0% real while Pattern sits at 11.1%). **THIS CONTRADICTS THE USER'S STANDING DIRECTIVE** to keep virtual-fitness selection. Recorded plainly in docs/selector_negative_value.md with a SHIPPED DECISION banner rather than done quietly: the mechanism is retained and one env var away, because the measurement says it is negative value on every rack size tested and on 10/10 adversaries. Revert one-liner (no rebuild): TR_RACK_PATTERN=both TR_RACK_HEADON=both TR_RACK_LINEAR=both TR_RACK_TSETLIN=both \ TR_RACK_CIRCULAR=both TR_RACK_GUESSFACTOR=both TR_RACK_WALLBOUNCE=both \ TR_RACK_ACCEL=both TR_RACK_STOPSHOT=both TR_RACK_DISPLACE=both TR_RACK_AVGLEAD=both \ TR_RACK_DECAYGF=both TR_RACK_KNN=both TR_RACK_TMSELECT=both ./out/ModularBot The unit test `testRevertOverrideRestoresFullRack` exercises exactly this table. FLOOR PATH, verified not assumed: `chooseFromFit` already returns `admitted[0]` on the floor path, so it respects admission by construction. Cold field + shipped default -> floor returns Pattern (id 5), NOT HeadOn. With an explicit all-`both` membership the same cold field returns gun 0 (HeadOn) - the old behaviour. Four assertions in `testFloorRespectsAdmission`. LIVENESS: one 1-round battle with NO overrides -> Pattern selected 105/105 = 100%, every other gun 0 including TMPattern. Honesty caveat retained in the doc: 4 of the 10 opponents were Tank Royale sample-bot PORTS rather than the original classic jars (only DrussGT is a real classic jar through the shim). Guards: test_rack_membership 48 (was 38; new floor/revert/default checks), test_tm_pattern_registration 20 (5 checks hard-coded the old default and were updated to assert the new one, with the TMPATTERN parity proof moved onto an explicit old-rack table), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_ram_decision 28, test_selector_tiebreak 19, test_tm_pattern_rack_live 4, test_tm_pattern_learning 3, acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12 VERDICT PASS. ModularBot compiles. FOLLOW-ON THIS EXPOSED: membership filters SELECTION but not virtual-bullet SPAWNING, so under `onlyPattern` the 13 unselected guns still predict and spawn every tick. Tsetlin alone is ~5.3 ms/tick (~41% of the 13.16 ms per-tick budget), so we are still paying for it while never using it. Gating spawn on admission would reclaim that; it was deliberately NOT done here because it would alter the measurement protocol mid-A/B. |
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SirStone
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9cd6e9b8ce |
Ablation: the radial TM is replaceable by a CONSTANT, and its avenue is dead on the
shipped metric The radial TM beats Linear on bmPoint, but its head never beat the majority baseline after the label bias was fixed - suggesting the win is a constant lean rather than learning. So: sweep a stateless constant short-range offset (new `common_libs/guns/radial_offset.nim`, no learning at all) against the learned TM. VERDICT (measured, offline range, seeds=3, 18 paired runs, 231 TM rounds): 1. **bmPoint - REPLACE the TM with a constant.** `RO_s0.95` (aim distance x0.95) TIES it early (9/9, p=1.0) and BEATS it overall (15/3, p=0.0075; 7.47% vs 6.89% per-run mean). A fixed -20px does the same. The head never beats its majority baseline (56.2% vs 57.2%). 2. **bmPath (the SHIPPED metric) - the radial avenue is a DEAD END.** TMRadial is a systematic LOSS there (2/16, p=0.0013); every constant is within +-0.2pp; the only real bmPath effect is the BotRadius clamp. So the radial shift cannot help the shipped configuration. 3. The per-adversary optimum DOES vary (fixed -10 for crazy, -30 for tr_crazy, scale 0.95 for three others) - but ONE GLOBAL CONSTANT still beats the adaptively-trained head, so the "fragility justifies learning" argument FAILS. THE REAL FINDING UNDERNEATH, and it generalises beyond this gun: the base linear prediction systematically OVERSHOOTS. Measured raw per-tick base radial error has mean -71 to -100 px; the enemy is NEARER than the prediction in 63-81% of shots and farther in only 4-14%, CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL SIX CAPTURES. Radial label histogram [415166,126461,120325,44694,19351] = 57.2% majority class, mean label -82.3 px, mean applied shift -37.6 px. So the net-short bias is a GENUINE property of these range-holders against a constant-velocity extrapolation (they decelerate and turn, so the true position is closer than the straight-line guess) - NOT a fixture artefact. That is worth chasing for the guns that actually ship. Caveat: bmPoint is not the shipped metric (bmPath won the real-hit-rate A/B for SELECTION), so a bmPoint win is not yet evidence of a real win. That needs a live test - and the natural target is Pattern, which is now the default and best gun. Adds radial_offset.nim + sweep_radial_offset.nim; tm_pattern.nim gains additive instrumentation only (radial label mean and applied-shift mean; no behaviour change, and test_tm_pattern_registration still passes all 20 checks). |
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SirStone
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589a230106 |
TM radial gun: registered (default OFF) + label-bias fix that removes the bias but
retracts its own earlier learning claim === TASK 1: REGISTERED AS GUN 14, DEFAULT `off` === The radial TM gun is now a first-class rack member (`TMPATTERN`, id 14), forceable alone with `TR_RACK_TMPATTERN=both` plus every other `TR_RACK_*=off`. DEFAULT IS `off`, and the justification matters: `both` would let it compete for selection AND (because the shared VirtualTracker ring is order-sensitive) shift every other gun's learning order, so it CANNOT leave the default path unchanged. With `off` its predict and spawnBullets are additionally GATED on rack admission (the only gun wired that way), so the shipped default never spawns it at all: zero cost, zero ring perturbation. Live proof: 1-round battle with only TMPATTERN racked -> `gun 14 (TMPattern): vShots=400 selected=104 other-gun selections=0`. Default-path-unchanged proof: parity checks that the 15-gun default bestGun/ selectGun equals the old 14-gun rack RNG-draw-for-RNG-draw, that gun 14 is never selected by default, and acceptance 12/12. Cost: 0.36 ms/tick (predict 0.30 + onResult 0.05) ~= 3% of the 13.16 ms budget. Tsetlin in the same harness is 1.62 ms/tick, so the new gun is ~4.5x cheaper. === TASK 2: THE LABEL-BIAS FIX - AND A RETRACTION === Root cause confirmed: under bmPoint a SHORT radial correction resolves the virtual bullet BEFORE the base arrival tick, so the label was dropped (labelMisses). Fix: defer the label in a pending queue and flush it once the arrival tick is recorded; labels still come from the BASE arrival tick. labelMisses 4,281,695 -> 0 training samples 1,071,824 -> 5,345,847 (x5) radial head acc 48.8% -> 57.0% (shuffled control 20.0%) bmPoint hit rate 9.4/5.8% -> 9.1/5.7% (unchanged, within noise) So the fix IMPROVES LEARNING but NOT the metric. **RETRACTION OF THE PREVIOUS JOB'S CLAIM.** It reported the radial head's 48.8% against a 36.7% majority baseline and concluded "conditional learning, not a constant bias". With the bias removed, the correctly-measured majority baseline is **58.2%** - so the head at 57.0% is AT/BELOW majority. The earlier apparent conditional learning was PARTLY AN ARTEFACT OF THE BIASED SAMPLE. The bmPoint metric win is real (TMRadial > Linear early 16/2 p=0.0013, overall 18/0 p<0.0001; > shuffled 18/0 p<0.0001) but it comes from a NET-POSITIVE AVERAGE RADIAL SHIFT, not from beating a majority classifier. Recorded plainly rather than left standing. Guards: test_tm_pattern_registration 20 (new), test_tm_pattern_rack_live 4 (new), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3 (the SIGSEGV is gone - the knn_gun rewrite is now committed), test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_ram_decision 28, test_rack_membership 38, test_selector_tiebreak 19, test_tm_pattern_learning 3, acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12. ModularBot compiles (release). Note: `common_libs/tests/range_guns.nim` still builds 14 offline drivers (the offline sweep constructs TmPatternGun directly and acceptance only inspects ids 0..13), so nothing breaks - but a future job wanting it in the offline rack must add a 15th driver and mirror the live admission gating. gun_stats.jsonl now emits 15 rows; downstream tooling should ignore id 14. |
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SirStone
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394b3deeed |
SETTLED: Pattern alone is the best single gun IN GENERAL, not just vs DrussGT
Closes the one-adversary caveat that blocked shipping `onlyPattern`. Two arms
(`full` vs `onlyPattern`, rack knobs only), one frozen binary from clean HEAD
(
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SirStone
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a54ae6a162 |
SETTLED: no small rack beats Pattern alone; the selector is negative value on a GOOD rack
Follow-up to |
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SirStone
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4657fe715e |
wave pairing: 36-58% of GF/DecayGF/KNN learning samples were MISLABELLED
The audit inferred (from code) that GF/DecayGF/KNN pop the OLDEST wave on resolution, while under bmPath bullets leave the arena in NON-FIFO order - so an outcome could be attached to the wrong wave. It also noted that `starved=0` does NOT rule this out. Both halves are now MEASURED. MISPAIRING RATE (10 DrussGT fixtures, real VirtualTracker, 344k resolutions/gun): gun bmPath mispair label err bmPoint mispair label err GuessFactor 36.48% 19.39% 18.24% 7.62% DecayGF 36.85% 19.52% 20.57% 8.64% KNN 57.91% 27.63% 29.75% 11.58% (starved = 0 everywhere, exactly as the audit predicted) So ~1 in 5 GF/DecayGF learning samples and ~1 in 4 KNN samples carried a WRONG guess-factor bin. This is a material corruption of the learning signal. FIX: the same fireTick-keyed ring scheme `tsetlin.nim`/`tm_selector.nim` already use - `slot = (fireTick*4 + bin) mod 1024` (period 256 ticks, longer than the ~91-tick max flight), looked up by exact key. Public interfaces unchanged; added `waveResolved`/`waveMispaired` integrity counters. AFTER: mispaired = 0 and starved = 0, both metrics, all three guns. EFFECT ON HIT RATE: SMALL AND NOT SIGNIFICANT. bmPath 4000 samples/gun: GuessFactor 23.20% -> 23.02% (-0.18pp, per-run sign-flip p=0.750) DecayGF 23.80% -> 24.25% (+0.45pp, p=0.625) KNN 18.27% -> 18.80% (+0.53pp, p=0.547) bmPoint: +0.05 / +0.33 / -0.15pp, p = 1.00 / 0.50 / 0.50. Per-run ranges overlap almost completely. A bullet-level z-test is anti-conservative (bullets within a fixture share a trajectory) and its KNN p=1.9e-16 cannot be trusted given ~10 effective independent runs. PLAIN READING: this is a CORRECTNESS fix, not a measurable hit-rate win. It removes a 36-58% mislabelling of the learning signal; the point estimates move by at most ~0.5pp, within run-to-run noise. Stated plainly rather than oversold. A REGRESSION IT CAUGHT IN ITSELF (and this explains the SIGSEGV another job saw and correctly attributed to a concurrent knn_gun.nim rewrite): the first implementation put an inline `array[1024, KNNWave]` (~100KB) inside each gun, which overflowed the default 8MB stack and made `test_power_selection` SIGSEGV. Causation was proven by stashing only the three gun files (test passed), then fixed by making the rings heap-backed `seq`. Verified: `test_power_selection` 3 PASS on the default stack, and zero inline `array[1024]` remain. Guards: test_wave_pairing 17 (new, pure), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_ram_decision 28. ModularBot compiles. Adds audit_wave_pairing.nim and compare_pairing.nim. |
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SirStone
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1ea72c7f14 |
TM gun round 2: base was never behind; RADIAL target beats Linear on bmPoint
=== TASK 1: MY PREMISE WAS REFUTED ===
I instructed the job to "fix the baseline" because an earlier measurement said the
TM gun's base did not iterate flight time like `LinearGun`. MEASURED: the new gun's
base is BYTE-FOR-BYTE `LinearGun` - 18/18 runs tie exactly, p=1.000, every per-run
row byte-identical. The "non-iterating baseline" belonged to the OLD `tsetlin.nim`,
not this gun. So no fix was needed, and the earlier inference should not have been
generalised to the new gun. (It did still align the zero-correction clamp to
LinearGun's exact [0, arena] range, and reports the old BotRadius-inset base was a
wash/marginally better at 34.2%/24.7%.)
=== TASK 2: THE RADIAL TARGET - A CONTROL-VALIDATED WIN, BUT ONLY ON bmPoint ===
Instead of the lateral (GF-bucket) component - which the linear lead already
captures - the TM now predicts the RADIAL component: will the enemy be nearer or
farther than the base prediction when our bullet arrives? A 5-class radial head
sharing the same 40-bit context and TM core; the readout advances/retards the aim
distance along the base bearing.
under bmPath (the SHIPPED metric): STRUCTURAL NO-OP
synthetic 8/8 exact ties, p=1.0; real 33.9%/24.1% vs Linear 34.0%/24.3%
under bmPoint: A WIN, control-validated
TMRadial 9.4% (6013/63785) / 5.8% (42079/726652)
Linear 7.2% / 4.7% overall 17/1, p=0.0001
Tsetlin 7.0% / 4.8% overall 15/3, p=0.0075
shuffled 7.0% / 3.6% early 17/1 p=0.0001; overall 18/0, p<0.0001
radial head online accuracy 48.8% vs 19.9% shuffled chance and 36.7% majority
-> it is CONDITIONAL learning, not a constant short-range bias.
Best config: TM_RADIAL_RANGE=60, TM_RAD_MARGIN=0.25, 5 classes.
CAVEAT THAT MATTERS: a win on `bmPoint` is NOT yet evidence of a real win. `bmPath`
is the shipped SELECTION metric precisely because it beat `bmPoint` on real hit
rate (7.43% vs 4.70%). But that A/B was about which gun to PICK, not about gun
QUALITY - a gun can be better in reality while scoring worse on the selection
metric. So this needs a LIVE test, and it is the decisive one.
=== TASK 3: REVERSAL TARGET - CLEAN NEGATIVE ===
The label positive rate is only 9.7% (rev=[24772,2673]) and the head's 86.8%
accuracy is BELOW the 90.3% majority baseline: it does not learn the positive
class at all. Hit-rate effect neutral (bmPath 19.5%/18.4% vs shuffled 19.1%/17.8%,
p=0.24/0.82). Dropped.
=== OVERALL ===
Not competitive on the shipped bmPath metric (gated GF 28.3%/22.2% vs Linear
34.0%/24.3%, p=0.0075). Better than Linear on bmPoint via TMRadial (+2.2pp early,
+1.1pp overall). Per-enemy reset exists; a fresh gun per round; NO cross-battle
persistence (the user's non-negotiable).
MEASURED LIMITATION: radial mode has a high labelMiss because aiming short
resolves BEFORE the base arrival tick, biasing training toward resolvable samples.
The metric win is label-independent. A deferred-label fix is the next refinement.
INFERRED: the mechanism is surfers being NEARER than the base prediction
(range-holding); a constant-short-offset ablation would separate a learned
short-range bias from genuine per-tick conditional prediction.
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SirStone
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78975a35c4 |
cost: parallel per-enemy virtual bullets are NOT affordable as proposed
Benchmark driving the real rack and the real VirtualTracker over 7 recorded DrussGT fixtures synthesised into an N-enemy melee. Answers "the virtual bullets are cheap, why not keep fitness for every enemy in parallel?" (the user's idea, motivated by making kill-stealing target switches free). BASELINE: exactly 4.0 predict calls per gun per tick (one per power bin) - 52/tick for the shipped 13-gun rack (TMSelect is compiled out). The task's 56/tick was the 14-gun figure. VERDICT: NOT AFFORDABLE. Budget is 13.16 ms/tick (76 ticks/s measured live). N=1 46% of budget N=2 94% <- already at the edge N=4 189% N=6 274% Marginal cost ~= 5.9 ms per extra target, linear. TWO FINDINGS THE PROPOSAL MISSED: 1. `onResult` TRAINING dominates, not predict. Tsetlin's onResult alone is 3.40 ms/tick - ~99.5% of all 13-gun onResult cost - doing ~174k rand() calls per resolved bullet. Every spawned bullet that resolves triggers it, so it scales 1:1 with targets. The per-target cost is the Tsetlin training pass. 2. `MaxBullets=8192` is a HARD BLOCKER, not just CPU. Spawn rate is 56*N/tick and path-metric bullets live until they hit a wall (40-90 ticks). Measured dropped bullets/tick: N=1 -> 0, N=2 -> ~3, N=4 -> ~180, N=6 -> ~300. At N=6 the ring wraps every ~24 ticks, so most bullets are silently clobbered and never scored. A working N=6 pipeline needs MaxBullets ~30k-50k (~4-6 MB, cheap RAM). ALSO MEASURED: Tsetlin and KNN do NOT cache per tick - they redo the full TM forward pass / full KNN scan for EACH of the 4 power bins (Tsetlin 1.94 ms/tick of predict, KNN 0.45). The earlier "tick-only cache" fix never touched the two most expensive predicts. Pattern and TMSelect do cache fully. MITIGATIONS (measured predict+spawn at N=6 vs 13.59 ms baseline): nearest-K=1 only 45% budget nearest-K=2 95% rotate every 3 ticks 95% drop Tsetlin for extras ~68% (INFERRED from Tsetlin's measured 90% share) Tsetlin is ~90% of the per-target cost, so excluding it from non-primary targets makes N=6 fit. "Resolve less often" is not a separate lever - resolution IS when training happens. ARCHITECTURAL CAVEAT (correctness, not cost - and not priced into the proposal): the shared-rack topology is broken for this. The guns are global singletons, so predicting for enemy B ADVANCES/OVERWRITES enemy A's velocity tracker, KNN feature history and Tsetlin frame window in the SAME instance. Per-enemy fitness with correct histories therefore requires PER-ENEMY GUN INSTANCES, which is what this benchmark measured. That multiplies the (already dominant) Tsetlin cost. CONSEQUENCE FOR THE PLAN: combined with the measured finding that the selector is negative value and the rack should shrink to a few good guns, this work is much less valuable than assumed - with a small rack (Pattern's predict is 40us and fully cached) the cost falls proportionally. Priority lowered accordingly. Caveat: the host was heavily loaded (load 15/16), so absolute ms carry ~30-50% noise; min-of-2 and two independent runs agree on the trend, the Tsetlin dominance, and the ring overflow. No melee fixture exists in the repo, so the 7 enemies are 7 distinct recorded trajectories (stated in the file header). |
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SirStone
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e0666a562d |
The gun selector is NEGATIVE value: Pattern alone beats the full rack (p=0.0012)
MEASURED against the real DrussGT, one frozen binary built from clean HEAD, rack knobs only (no source edits), 5 arms x 7 runs x 7 rounds, 8 concurrent battles, judged ONLY on server-side real hit rate from the events sidecar, exact two-sided permutation test on per-run rates. arm runs shots hits real % dmg/run p vs full full (shipped) 7 3898 270 6.93 159 -- onlyPattern 7 4582 494 10.78 287 0.0012 <- BETTER onlyKNN 7 4033 207 5.13 119 0.1340 onlyLinear 7 3215 105 3.27 65 0.0082 onlyGF 7 3193 72 2.25 45 0.0012 Firing Pattern ALONE gives +3.85pp pooled hit rate and +80% damage per run, and it fires MORE shots (4582 vs 3898) - it dominates on rate and volume. This is not "any single gun wins" (full beats Linear, GF and KNN); it is specifically "Pattern alone beats the rack". WHY - the virtual fitness signal mis-ranks guns against real outcomes: - HeadOn is massively over-selected: 31.4% of ticks, the most real shots (1070), but only 4.5% REAL. It alone drags the rack down. - Pattern has the best virtual rank and near-best real rate (11.9%, rank 2), yet is selected only 22.6% of the time. - Linear's apparent strength was SELECTION BIAS: conditional on being selected it looked like 15.2% (n=33), but its UNCONDITIONAL rate (onlyLinear) is 3.27%. Every earlier per-gun "real rate" in this repo is conditional on selection and is therefore confounded. This experiment is the clean measurement. NOT YET SETTLED (do not overclaim): - ONE ADVERSARY. All of this is vs DrussGT. Pattern must be re-checked against other bots before it becomes the default on this evidence alone. - Whether a SMALL rack of good guns beats Pattern alone. The selector is negative value on the CURRENT bloated rack; that does not prove it is negative value on a rack of only good guns. That is the next experiment and it decides whether the selection apparatus is fixed or disabled. - The user's standing directive is to KEEP virtual-fitness selection. This measurement conflicts with it, so the next step tests the selector on a small good rack rather than assuming either answer. Context - three prior selection-side attempts all failed: hysteresis (7.02% -> 5.10%, p=0.002), commitment (7.17% -> 4.44%, p=0.0012), arrival-accuracy tie-break (7.08%, p=0.88 null). The per-tick random draw is load-bearing on three independent measurements. This experiment locates the real problem one level up: which guns are in the rack, and that the virtual signal ranks them wrongly. Preserves the reusable harness (tools/ab/which_gun_run_one.sh, which_gun_arm_env.sh, which_gun_analyze.py) and the full writeup (docs/selector_negative_value.md). |
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SirStone
|
0ede6d12ec |
selector: arrival-accuracy tie-break measured NEGATIVE; randomness is load-bearing
Hypothesis under test (from the gun audit, which named the tie-band as "the lever that matters most"): `bmPath` is deliberately generous (2.3-3.6x `bmPoint`), so a gun can sit in the tied band on a ray that sweeps the target's path while its bullets ARRIVE badly. So: keep the `path`-ranked band (path beat point on real hit rate 7.43% vs 4.70%, z=5.56), but narrow the random draw inside it using a parallel `point` (arrival-accuracy) window. RESULT: NO EFFECT. Real DrussGT, ONE frozen binary (/tmp/ModularBot_tieband, md5 2c0c56e6...), env knobs only, 7 runs x 7 rounds per arm, server-side events sidecar, exact two-sided permutation test on per-run rates. arm runs shots real % dmg/run d p tbbase (shipped) 7 4128 7.17 175 -- -- tbpt path-rank + point-narrow 7 3938 7.08 165 +0.14 0.88 tbpc =commit control 7 3759 4.44 98 +2.74 0.0012 tbpt25 point margin 0.25 7 3683 5.59 119 +1.65 0.20 tbtie05 / tbtie40 (band width) 7 3937/3917 5.84/6.28 133/144 1.49/1.00 0.11/0.25 tbwin50 (SelectorWindow=50) 7 3983 6.05 139 +1.20 0.11 tbfloor10 (FloorPeakFrac=0.10) 7 3829 5.33 118 +2.12 0.11 tbpt vs base: fully overlapping ranges, p=0.88. This is a REAL null, not a dead arm - the mechanism was live, and it visibly changed the selected-gun mix (Pattern 24%->16%, Accel 6%->16%, Tsetlin ~0%->13%). CONTROL VALIDATED, AND THIS IS THE THIRD TIME: removing the random draw inside the band is SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE (4.44%, p=0.0012). Combined with the earlier hysteresis A/B (7.02% -> 5.10% for commitment) and the light-hysteresis result, the selector's per-tick randomness is now load-bearing on three independent measurements. Narrowing the band on ANY second virtual statistic has not helped. Every knob swept (band width, floor, window) is nominally worse than shipped at n=7; that is "no credible win" rather than "proven harm" (sd ~1.8pp, ~1pp resolution, underpowered). Shipped default stays `GUN_SELECTOR_TIEBREAK=off`; the feature is opt-in, fully guarded, and costs zero extra work on the default path (point windows are scored only when the mode is on). Guards: test_selector_tiebreak 19 (new, pure), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_ram_decision 28, test_rack_membership 38, acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12 PASS (offline path calls neither chooseFromFit nor the tie-break). STRATEGIC CONCLUSION: three selection-side attempts have now failed (hysteresis, commitment, point tie-break). The selector is at a local optimum and the remaining lever is the QUALITY OF THE GUNS, not the selection among them. |
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SirStone
|
ca82053a11 |
TM gun: the discrete-target diagnosis was RIGHT - it learns now. Still loses to Linear.
The user's goal: a TM gun that is the best 1v1 gun, starting from scratch every
battle but quickly overfitting the current enemy. The previous attempt (knob
tuning) failed: NO configuration beat its own shuffled-feedback control, and the
TM-off ablation scored the same as TM-on, i.e. the TM's correction was
near-zero-mean noise. Diagnosis then: a Tsetlin Machine is a CLASSIFIER, and we
were asking it for an absolute aim point - a regression target. So this attempt
gave it a DISCRETE target (multi-class over guess-factor buckets) with 40
binary/bucketed motion features, and measured it against Linear, the default
Tsetlin gun, and a MANDATORY shuffled control.
THE DIAGNOSIS IS CONFIRMED - THE TM LEARNS, DECISIVELY:
online class accuracy 46.0% vs shuffled control 20.0% (2.3x chance)
raw ungated argmax 21.2%/18.6% vs shuffled 15.2%/8.3% (18/18, p<0.0001)
TMPattern > its shuffled control, overall 17/1 runs, p=0.0001
Compare the previous attempt, which could not beat shuffled feedback at all.
TMPattern also beats the default Tsetlin gun early (17/1, p=0.0001), so it is a
strictly better TM gun than the one in the rack.
BUT IT IS NOT COMPETITIVE WITH LINEAR ON REAL SURFERS:
real DrussGT, bmPath (the shipped metric), 3 seeds, pooled early/overall
Linear 34.0% (6358/18715) 24.3% (58297/239943)
TMPattern (gated) 27.9% (15514/55535) 22.0% (158658/719681)
TMPatternShuf 28.7% 19.4%
Linear > TMPattern: 15/18 early p=0.0075, 15/18 overall p=0.0075
bmPoint: neutral (7.2%/4.6% vs Linear 7.2%/4.7%)
synthetic controlled motion: matches/edges Linear (66.8%/60.6% vs 66.4%/59.6%,
shuffled 55.7%/50.1%) - the mechanism works when motion is predictable.
So: the representation fix moved this from "learns nothing" to "learns strongly
but applies its knowledge badly". INFERRED reason for the residual loss: the
linear lead is already the modal GF bucket (the label histogram is centred), so
corrective excursions away from it are net-negative. The measured deficit lives
in the BASELINE and in RANGE, not in the TM knobs - which is why further knob
tuning was never going to work.
Best config: gated hard K=5, TM_CONF_MARGIN=0.25, TM_SHRINK=0.5.
NOT TRIED (time-boxed): the binary-reversal target, and a RADIAL (range-holding)
target - the latter is the top next step.
Adds `common_libs/guns/tm_pattern.nim` (NOT registered in the rack),
`common_libs/tests/sweep_tm_pattern.nim`, and a durable writeup at
`common_libs/tests/tm_pattern_sweep_results.md`.
|
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SirStone
|
a73de13458 |
racks: separate melee and 1v1 gun racks, plus per-mode real hit-rate data
The user's plan: "separate racks for melee and 1v1, so the bot switches from those based on the situation, and we can put the guns we want in one or both racks." MECHANISM - `RackMode` (rm1v1/rmMelee) derived from SERVER TRUTH: `rackMode(enemyCount)` = 1v1 when the count is 1, melee otherwise. This is the SAME `getEnemyCount()` value the radar already uses, so there is now ONE definition of the mode. (Using the tracker's known-enemy count was a previous bug in the radar: it read 1 before the second enemy was scanned.) - `RackMembership` per gun: both (default) | 1v1 | melee | off. - The selector ranks only admitted guns - including the floor path and the incumbent-hysteresis path. - Empty filtered set FALLS BACK to the full rack, so the bot can never end up with no gun. - Env-overridable at process start, no rebuild: `TR_RACK_<GUN>` for all 14 guns (TR_RACK_HEADON, TR_RACK_LINEAR, ... TR_RACK_TMSELECT), values both|1v1|melee|off. Empty/unknown -> both + a stderr warning, never fatal. - `[rack] mode=<1v1|melee> active=<guns> overrides=<...>` logged once per mode change, never per tick. DEFAULT IS UNCHANGED: every gun ships `rmBoth`, so behaviour is byte-identical until the user re-racks anything. Verified by the unit test's default-config selection parity (RNG draw for RNG draw) and by `test_gun_harness` 39 and acceptance 12/12. `chooseFromFit` iterates the admitted list in ascending id order, so the random tie-break draws are unchanged. NO TUNING DONE, deliberately: we had no per-gun melee hit-rate data, and an earlier 15-paired-run experiment found pruning neutral-to-negative on hit rate (p=0.57/0.21). So all guns stay `both` and the membership pass waits for data. PER-MODE DATA PLUMBING (this is what unblocks that pass): per-gun real shot accounting is now split by the rack in force at fire time, adding to gun_stats.jsonl: realShots1v1, realHits1v1, realHitRate1v1, realShotsMelee, realHitsMelee, realHitRateMelee. Verification: test_rack_membership 38/38 (new, pure, no battle); test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24, test_power_policy 26, test_ram_decision 28; acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12 VERDICT PASS; ModularBot compiles. The live `[rack]` line was observed switching 1v1 -> melee when the enemy died. The offline range never calls the selector (only spawnBullets/tickBullets/ reportFor), so mode filtering cannot change the offline result and no offline mode parameter was needed - confirmed by reasoning over the source and by 12/12. |
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SirStone
|
ab86c0481f |
gun audit: the virtual system is sound; the rack is redundant, not broken
Audited all 14 guns offline over the committed DrussGT fixtures (~150k resolved bullets/gun) plus 123 rounds of live gun_stats. Prompted by a GUI observation that selected guns "fire dozens of pixels away" and a suspicion of reverse selection. MY HYPOTHESIS WAS WRONG. I expected guns to be ignoring `bulletSpeed`, which would make their 4 power bins identical and the per-bin fitness pure noise. MEASURED: only `HeadOn` is speed-blind (100% identical bins) and that is its correct definition. Every other gun emits 91-94% DISTINCT per-bin predictions (mean intra-tick bin spread 62-103px). The earlier "tick-only cache collapsed all bins onto bin 0" fix is complete across the whole rack. LEAD/SIGN/UNITS ARE CORRECT: replaying synthetic ground truth, all 14 guns score 100% on a stationary target (which also proves predictions are ABSOLUTE - a relative or angle return would score 0), ~100% on constant-velocity for every leaded gun, Circular 100% / Accel 99.8% on a 3deg/tick circle, WallBounce 98.2% on a bounce. No missing lead, no sign inversion. Resolution is right (BotRadius 18, hit credited to the owning gun). FEEDBACK IS INTACT: offline pushes=151260/starved=0, Tsetlin trained=149205/ traceMisses=0; live `vStarved=0` and `vDropped=0` across all 123 rounds. THE "43% FLAT / 4x OPTIMISTIC" EVIDENCE I CITED IS NOT REPRODUCIBLE on current code/data. Live virtual/real ratios against DrussGT are 0.8-2.0 for most guns (Linear 10.9 virt / 13.4 real; KNN 8.1/7.1; DecayGF 10.5/9.8). The 43%-flat session matches an older config or a weak opponent (SittingDuck), not DrussGT. `bmPath` IS 2.3-3.6x `bmPoint` - but by design and documented: it asks "does the ray eventually sweep the target's path", a deliberately generous relative signal. So the flat tie is a RANKING artefact: many guns share the same base forecast and, with a near-zero learned correction, collapse onto the same ray; RelTieMargin=0.20 then treats the top ~half of the rack as tied. DUTY AND OVERLAP (>=50% of ticks within 20px = redundant): Tsetlin ~ StopShot 87% -> duplicate pair DecayGF ~ GuessFactor 92% -> duplicate pair Accel ~ Circular 65% -> partial duplicate WallBounce~ Linear 58% AvgLead = the MEAN of Linear+Circular+WallBounce (constructed redundancy) Displace worst point% (6.6) AND worst real% (2.4); wins no bucket TMSelect DEAD - never spawned (EnableTmSelector=false), 0 shots in every log Pattern the ONLY gun competitive in every distance/speed bucket HeadOn/Linear/Tsetlin/StopShot are identical copies of each other on a real surfer (v<1 ~50.8%, everything else ~2%) RECOMMENDED LEAN RACK (8): HeadOn, Linear, Circular, Accel, Pattern, GuessFactor, KNN, WallBounce. DROP (6): TMSelect (dead), AvgLead (constructed mean), Displace (worst), DecayGF (92% GF), StopShot (87% Tsetlin), Tsetlin (the repo's own sweep already showed it learns nothing on DrussGT). HONEST HEADLINE: pruning is NOT expected to raise hit rate - an earlier 15-paired-run experiment found it neutral-to-negative (p=0.57/0.21). The mechanism by which it could help is a SELECTOR effect (shrinking the tied band), not a gun effect, and that is UNVERIFIED until A/B'd. The virtual system and the rack are basically sound; the lever that matters most is the selector's metric/tie-band, not deleting guns. DESIGN SMELL FOUND (INFERRED, not measured): GF/DecayGF/KNN `onResult` pops the OLDEST wave, but under bmPath bullets leave the arena in non-FIFO order, so a resolution can be paired with a neighbouring tick's wave. starved=0 does not rule this out. Candidate fix: key waves by fireTick, as Tsetlin/TMSelect do. Adds common_libs/tests/audit_virtual_guns.nim (offline, no shipped file touched). |
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SirStone
|
994f88d7a7 |
ramming: make the decision PROACTIVE, with a bullet-rain abort
The user watched 1v1 and melee runs and saw ram opportunities arise that the bot
declined: "there were moments where the bot could jump over the enemy and shred
it but shot it down instead."
DIAGNOSIS - a chicken-and-egg loop. `ramOpportunity` required dist < 50px, but
an offline measurement over 15 rounds vs DrussGT found the closest approach was
118.7px and the <50px trigger had NEVER fired: the mover has no reason to close,
so the trigger waited for a proximity nothing created. The MECHANISM to close
already existed (the ring mover expresses a ram as band=(0,50)); what was
missing was a decision that fires at a range the bot can actually close from.
Changes:
- opportunity gate relaxed: dist 50 -> TR_RAM_OPP_DIST (200), energy margin
+30 -> TR_RAM_OPP_MARGIN (15). Both env-tunable, no rebuild needed.
- New pure module `common_libs/movements/ram_decision.nim` holding the trigger
and abort logic (no battle/API deps), so it is unit-testable.
- BULLET-RAIN ABORT (the user asked for this earlier): `onHitByBullet` now
accumulates `e.bullet.power` into a 15-turn ring; damageRatePerTurn = sum/15;
an in-progress ram aborts when rate > TR_RAM_ABORT_DMG (0.5/turn). On abort:
isRamming=false, cooldown 30, TARGET KEPT, and the mover returns to the normal
range band. It never stops the bot.
- Opt-in, DEFAULT-OFF `plan` trigger for "change of plan when the gun duel is
failing" (dist<250, margin+20, selected gun's pooled virtual rate < 0.05).
Left off because a cold gun reads 0.0 and would qualify - speculative.
- `TR_RAM_LOG=1` change-gated line: `[ram] ON reason=opportunity dist=143
selfE=78 enemyE=41 cap=3.0 band=[0,50]` / `[ram] OFF reason=bulletRain`.
- Existing cooldown/duration/stuck machinery untouched (stuck>10 or duration>60
-> abort + cooldown 30). A refactor bug that briefly DROPPED the
`ramCooldownTicks == 0` gate was caught and fixed.
Trigger set (first match wins): finisher (dist<300, enemy<20, we are healthier);
opportunity (dist<200, we lead by 15+); desperation (both <5, dist<150); plan
(off). All require enemy>0, a valid target, and no cooldown.
Proof the intent now fires at a closable distance (28/28 unit checks):
PASS: opportunity fires at dist 143 with a 37-energy lead <- the exact case
PASS: old gate (dist<50, margin+30) does NOT fire at 143 <- the old bug
PASS: fires at 199px / does NOT fire at 201px
+ margin, finisher priority, desperation, plan on/off, window mean, abort
threshold checks.
HONEST FRAMING: ram damage is 0.6 per CONTACT EVENT, one-shot (collision
resolution rewinds positions so contacts do not stream) - small next to a p=3.0
bullet hit (16). The payoff is that point-blank forces hit probability toward 1,
so heavy bullets stop missing and E[dE]=p(3P-1) turns positive above P=1/3; ram
damage also scores 2.0/point (highest in the game) and a ram kill carries a 0.30
bonus vs 0.20. So this is "force the fight to point-blank", not "the ram shreds
them". Base rate is rare (2 collisions in the whole fixture corpus).
Guards: test_ram_decision 28 (new), test_power_policy 26, test_gun_harness 39,
test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41,
test_tfil_ring_weights 24. Compiles (release).
UNVERIFIED: the live effect. No A/B has run, and whether the mover actually
reaches contact is unproven.
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SirStone
|
c9825dfb0b |
power policy: cap power by range and energy, gate 3.0 on above-average chances
Implements the user's energy management request: "firing from more than 200px should be a 'not good chances zone' so faster bullets and more chances to hit matters more than single hit damage with low chances. When we are lower than 50 health, same thing. I would like to use 3.0 power only when the chances of hitting are higher than average." Design: a CAP on top of the existing `bestPower`, not a rewrite. `bestPower` still answers "which bin does this gun's own data prefer"; the policy caps it: ramming -> 3.0 (reason ram, exempt) dist > TR_POWER_FAR_DIST (200) -> 1.0 (far) elif selfEnergy < TR_POWER_LOW_ENERGY (50) -> 1.0 (lowEnergy) elif pEst <= pRef -> 2.0 (belowAvg) else -> 3.0 (full) power = min(gunPreferredBinPower, cap) # can only LOWER power p=1.0 is the right "low" tier on the measured mechanics: bullet speed 20-3p so p=1.0 gives speed 17 vs 11 at p=3.0 (55% faster = less lead error), fire interval 10+2p so 12 ticks vs 16 (33% more shots), and drain 0.083/turn vs 0.1875 (2.25x slower). All three things the user asked for at long range. pEst = the chosen bin's virtual rate (gun aggregate when the bin is empty); pRef = the gun's aggregate mean unless TR_POWER_REF > 0. No-data guns are vacuously below-average -> cap 2.0 (conservative, documented). Control arm: TR_POWER_POLICY=0 = uncapped = today's behaviour exactly. Knobs: TR_POWER_POLICY, TR_POWER_FAR_DIST, TR_POWER_LOW_ENERGY, TR_POWER_FAR_CAP, TR_POWER_MID_CAP, TR_POWER_REF, TR_POWER_LOG. TR_POWER_MID_CAP exists because the user did not specify the middle case (close + healthy + not-above-average); 2.0 is the default, flippable to 1.0. Seam: the cap lives in a pure `applyPowerPolicy` and is applied only in `selectShot` (the single place real shots are chosen), so the logic is testable without a battle. Ram is wired from `shouldRam` - the same value the movement dispatch uses for the (0,50) band. CORRECTION TO AN ASSUMPTION IN THE TASK: `offline_range.nim` does NOT call `bestPower`/`selectShot` - it only replays virtual-bullet spawn/resolve across all power bins, independent of the real shot's power. So there is no offline power-selection path that could diverge from the live one, and the acceptance test guards the metric, not the policy. Policy coverage therefore comes from the new unit test. Verification: test_power_policy 26/26 in BOTH modes (default and TR_POWER_POLICY=0 control arm); test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41, test_tfil_ring_weights 24; acceptance_offline_vs_online 12/12 VERDICT PASS (live battle). ModularBot compiles. UNVERIFIED: the live effect on damage/survival/score. No A/B has run. |
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SirStone
|
9caf1d3728 |
movement: range-weighted TFIL variant + tamed heat field (opt-in, default unchanged)
New mover `the_floor_is_lava_ring.nim`, a COPY of `the_floor_is_lava.nim` (which stays byte-identical - the user explicitly wants the current TFIL preserved). Selected only via `TR_MOVEMENT=tfil_ring`; the default stays `tfil`. WHY: our measured real hit rate vs DrussGT is strongly range-dependent - 21.6% at 0-100px, 27.1% at 100-200px, 19.3% at 200-300, 10.9% at 300-400, 6.8% at 400-600, 5.4% at 600-800 - but we shoot from ~450px on average. Plain TFIL has no range preference at all. THE ONE CHANGE: the final tile draw is re-weighted toward a target band. rangeW(d) = 1.0 if lo<=d<=hi; exp(-((lo-d)/K)^2) if d<lo; exp(-((d-hi)/K)^2) if d>hi w_i = rangeW(d_i)^(1/T); chosen ~ Categorical(w) FLAT TOP on purpose: a Gaussian centred on the band midpoint would collapse the band to a point and destroy the within-band hedge. `T` is the only knob; `TR_TFIL_RANGE_TEMP=0` gives plain `rand(candidates.high)` - the exact control arm. Safety stays a HARD constraint: the weighting only reorders the draw among the pool the old code already accepted, so it can never pick a tile the old code rejected (monotone refinement). Small pools (<4) stay uniform. Randomness is deliberately KEPT: a measured A/B showed committing to the "best" tile made real hit rate WORSE (7.02% -> 5.10%), so the distribution is tilted, never removed. HEAT TAMING (ring copy only; env-overridable): TR_TFIL_CORRIDOR_HEAT 20.0 -> 5.0 TR_TFIL_WALL_HOTNESS 30.0 -> 10.0 Rationale, measured: `CorridorHeat=20` is TWICE `PathDangerThreshold=10`, so a single corridor could poison a path by itself; `WallHotness=30` with `WallRadiance=10` put the outer two tile rings over threshold on their own. Per-source shares of total lava: wall 60.6%, corridor 25.4%, pillar 7.4%, everything else <3%. MEASURED EFFECT (primary fixture, 20,026 ticks / 15 rounds, field identity verified max diff 0.000e+00): metric original(20/30) ring(5/10) band-weightable ticks 10.79% 26.45% mean safeTiles/tick 15.19 85.04 ticks with 0 safe (pre-fallback) 58.5% 7.5% safePool >= 4 39.05% 92.47% >=1 safe tile in 100-200px 11.84% 26.64% MEAN CLOSEST-SAFE-TILE DISTANCE 397.78px 284.84px tiles > 10 threshold 0.61 0.15 The 397.78px figure is why the bot stayed far away: the safety filter left nothing safe near the target, and 397px is our WORST range. Control: setting corridor=20 wall=30 reproduces the original baseline exactly. CEILING, honestly: even at corridor 0 / wall 0 only ~40% of ticks are band-weightable, so no constant tweak fully unlocks the range weighting. Ram unification: the ring mover takes a `band` field; ramming becomes just `band=(0,50)`, so there is one movement engine. The `tfil` path is unchanged. Observability: magenta annulus at the band edges, candidates tinted by weight, chosen tile marked; one `[tfil_ring]` log line on change (now including corridorHeat/wallHotness). Guards: test_tfil_ring_weights 24/24 (new, pure, no battle), test_gun_harness 39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3, test_adaptive_radar 41. UNVERIFIED: the mover's live effect. It has not been run in a battle yet. |
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SirStone
|
2daa519e15 |
TFIL heat field: the safety model keeps us ~400px away, which is our worst range
Offline diagnostic driving the REAL TFILModule.computeMove over the committed
DrussGT fixtures (re-derived field matched the module's own m.lava bit-for-bit,
max diff 0.000e+00). Answers "is the heat map too hot, and are the corridors to
blame?" - the user's suspicion after watching a GUI run stay far away.
PRIMARY FIXTURE (tr_drussgt_vs_modularbot, 20,026 ticks / 15 rounds):
Field saturation
tiles == 0 22%
tiles > 0 78%
tiles > PathDangerThreshold(10) 61% (worst tick 91%)
median / p90 / max lava 20.06 / 44.53 / 77.51
> 10 with NO bullets at all 44% <- wall radiance + pillar alone
early/mid/late frac > 10 0.61 / 0.63 / 0.60 (saturated from tick 0, not degrading)
Safe pool - THIS IS THE KEY NUMBER
inside-hull tiles/tick 173.7
safeTiles/tick 15.19
ticks with ZERO tile passing the filter 58.5% (2-tile promote fallback used 59.0%)
ticks where the ring weighting is enabled (pool >= MinRingPool=4) 39.1%
ticks with >=1 safe tile in the 100-200px band 11.84%
MEAN DISTANCE TO THE CLOSEST SAFE TILE 397.8 px
ticks both pool>=4 AND band present ("band-weightable") 10.79%
So the safety filter leaves nothing safe near the target: the closest safe tile
averages 398px away. Our measured hit rate is 27.1% at 100-200px and ~5% at
450px, so TFIL's danger model structurally parks us at our worst range. This -
not only the env-var issue - is why the bot stays far away.
Per-source attribution (share of total lava / of the over-10 set)
wall 60.56% / 56.39% <- saturates the RAW field
corridor 25.43% / 21.35% <- blocks the BAND
pillar 7.44% / 5.06%
bullet_aura 2.22% / 1.47%
enemy_core 1.97% / 0.62%
bullet_core 1.17% / 0.33%
enemy_aura 1.21% / 0.95%
Note CorridorHeat=20 is TWICE PathDangerThreshold=10, so a single corridor can
poison a path on its own; WallHotness=30 with WallRadiance=10 puts the outer two
tile rings at/over threshold by themselves (38.6% of all tiles).
Counterfactuals (shipped constants NOT changed) - band-weightable ticks
corridor 20 (shipped) 10.79% band-safe 11.84% pool 15.19
corridor 10 16.47% pool 30.54
corridor 5 23.80% band-safe 24.21% pool 43.93
corridor 0 38.74% pool 62.14
wall 30->10 only pool 15.19 -> 24.80, band unchanged (12.31%)
corridor 5 + wall 10 26.45% band-safe 26.64% pool 85.04
Reachability - NOT the blocker
band inside the 50-tick reachable hull 64.94% of ticks
0-300px inside hull 90.34%
So the band is reachable 65% of the time but SAFE only 12%: the 53-point gap is
heat, not hull geometry.
VERDICT: heat saturation is the real blocker; the WALL is the largest raw-heat
source but the CORRIDORS are the band blocker (removing them multiplies
band-weightable ticks 3.6x, while taming walls leaves the band unchanged).
Even at corridor=0/wall=0 the band is weightable only 40% of ticks, so no
constant tweak fully unlocks the range weighting - the safe set against DrussGT
rarely reaches 100-200px at all. Recommended (NOT applied): CorridorHeat 20->5
and WallHotness 30->10, to be validated by a live A/B.
Adds common_libs/tests/measure_tfil_heat_field.nim (offline, no shipped file
touched; both movers byte-identical).
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SirStone
|
391318a7bd |
cornering/ramming premise REFUTED on three independent measurements
Hypothesis (user's): pushing an enemy toward a wall makes it predictable, which
both enables a ram and raises our gun hit rate. Measured offline over the
committed DrussGT fixtures using REAL server event attribution (an events
sidecar survived: tools/robocode_shim/evidence/tr_drussgt_vs_modularbot.events.json,
2534 fires / 229 hits; per-round event tick joins the fixture global tick at
global = round.startTick + tick - 2, verified exact over all 2534 fires).
M1 - cornering does NOT raise hit rate.
REAL attribution, all 1134 ModularBot shots, bucketed by DrussGT's distance
to the nearest wall at fire time:
<=30px 69 shots 5 hits 7.25%
30-60 336 18 5.36%
60-120 555 26 4.68%
120-250 172 11 6.40%
>250 2 0 0.00%
TOTAL 1134 60 5.29%
Adjacent(<=60) 5.68% vs Open(>60) 5.08%, z=+0.435 -> NOT significant.
Per-round ranges fully overlap (adjacent 0-18.2%, open 0-9.6%).
Virtual per-gun within-gun check: most guns neutral-to-negative; only DecayGF
favours it. Across all 10 fixtures every one of 12 guns scores LOWER adjacent
(range-confounded, directional only).
M2 - a wall-adjacent enemy is LESS predictable, not more.
30-degree tolerance, uniform chance 16.7%, adjacent vs open:
keep-direction (1 tick) 93.35% vs 95.88% z=-13.82
turn-persistence 87.6% vs 90.9%
constant-velocity err H=10 45.9% vs 25.7% (1.8x MORE deviation)
"move away from nearest wall" 1.1% vs 8.4%
"move toward centre" 0.4% vs 3.0%
Wall-adjacent DrussGT reverses more and deviates from constant-velocity ~1.8x
more. It does NOT flee the wall - it surfs perpendicular. Base rate of
wall-adjacency: 20.2% of moving ticks.
M3 - the ram is a near-zero-frequency opportunity against DrussGT.
Strict contact (<=36px): ZERO ticks in all 10 fixtures. Closest global
approach 39.1px. In the primary fixture (ModularBot vs DrussGT) the closest
approach was 118.7px - 0 ticks <=80px, 0 near-contact episodes, and ZERO ram
collisions in 15 rounds. Real ram collisions anywhere in the corpus: 2 total
(drussgt_vs_ramfire 1/20 rounds, tr_drussgt_vs_crazy 1/10), each a ONE-SHOT
0.6 energy to both bots, no sustained multi-tick stream.
CORRECTION TO AN EARLIER CLAIM: ram damage is 0.6 per CONTACT EVENT, not
0.6/turn sustained. The efficiency ratio (0.6 damage for 0.6 energy taken,
scored 2.0/pt) still beats firing, but the magnitude is 0.6 vs 16 for a p=3
bullet hit, and against DrussGT the frequency is zero.
CAVEAT (from the analysis): the fixtures capture DrussGT's NATURAL wall
behaviour, not an enemy being actively pushed into a corner by a rammer, so the
exact scenario is not directly represented. But M3 shows we never get close
enough to push in the first place - ModularBot's closest approach in 15 rounds
was 118.7px, so the <50px ram trigger has never fired against this adversary.
Adds two reusable offline instruments:
- measure_cornering_guns.nim (replays a fixture through the real VirtualTracker,
attributing each resolved virtual bullet to its fire-tick wall bucket)
- measure_cornering_ram.py (real-event join, predictability, ram base rate)
Neither edits offline_range.nim; the 12/12 deterministic-gun contract is
untouched and was not re-run (it requires a live battle).
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SirStone
|
07f6f3af3f |
Tsetlin gun: NO configuration adapts faster than random feedback
The user's goal was "a TM gun that can learn fast and generalize better". Swept offline over the real DrussGT fixtures (no live battles) by coordinate descent, one lever at a time, with a SHUFFLED-FEEDBACK CONTROL - a TM trained on randomised targets. That control is what settles the question. Final confirmation, 4 seeds each (~74,600 first-100-tick bullets per config): config EARLY(first 100) OVERALL Shuf_w3 (RANDOM feedback) 23.9% 20.0% win3_s1.1 (best real TM found) 23.7% 20.2% Shuf_w10 (RANDOM feedback) 23.1% 20.0% win3_st100 (prior job's edit) 23.0% 20.1% win3_off (TM correction ~= 0) 22.7% 20.2% def_w10 (shipped default) 22.1% 20.3% Linear (deterministic reference) 34.0% 24.3% The best real config beats the default early (23.7% vs 22.1%, non-overlapping per-seed ranges, z=+7.34, p=2e-13) - but its own SHUFFLED control scores 23.9%, i.e. HIGHER, z=-0.91, p=0.37. Random targets do at least as well. So the early gain is not learning. Per-lever screens were flat: TM_N_CLAUSES 25/50/100/200 all 23.0% early, completely flat; TM_N_STATES 4/32/100 all ~22-23% (unstable across seeds); TM_S mildly monotonic (lower better early); TM_T flat; TM_WINDOW_SIZE 2/3/10 all within noise of each other and of the shuffled control. Two further findings: - The TM-off ablation (correction ~= 0) scores 22.7%/20.2%, essentially the same as TM-on. The TM's correction is near-zero-mean noise; the gun's one-shot internal linear baseline accounts for its accuracy. - The TM gun is 10.3 pp behind Linear early and 4.1 pp behind overall. That deficit is in the BASELINE MODEL (LinearGun iterates flight time; this gun does not), not in the TM hyper-parameters. Tuning knobs cannot close it. Conclusion: do not tune TM hyper-parameters further. Either the input representation or the prediction target is what needs to change - the shuffled control shows the TM is not extracting target information beyond its baseline. Defaults left UNCHANGED (window=10/states=32/S=1.5/T=25/clauses=50); an uncommitted prior edit (window=3/states=100) was reverted as unsupported. Hyper-parameters are now compile-time overridable (-d:TM_WINDOW_SIZE=3 etc.) so future sweeps need no gun edit. NOT MEASURED: real hit rate vs DrussGT (offline only by design). The repo's own docs/gun_rack_analysis.md 2 reports the virtual metric is a sign-unstable ranker of real hit rate, so the comparison against "Linear 10.7% real" is not direct - whether the TM is competitive live is INFERRED-unknown, not measured. Guards: test_gun_harness 39/39, test_vbullet_metric, test_power_selection, test_tsetlin_gun, test_tm_pattern_learning all green. |
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SirStone
|
fb36a0a685 |
tracker: corpses do not exist - revert the fix and retire the workaround
The belief "BotDeathEvent never reaches ModularBot, so enemyTracker keeps dead
enemies alive forever" was written into a code comment and then believed twice.
It is FALSE. Measured in a 7-bot melee with a per-tick probe comparing
enemyTracker's alive count against the server's getEnemyCount():
metric 1.3.1 (20 rd) 0.35.5 (15 rd)
observed enemy deaths 83 68
...non-round-ending 83 (100%) 66 (97%)
ekBotDeath events DROPPED 0 0
max dispatch lag (turns behind) 1 1
phantom ticks 1 / 16,820 1 / 12,596
MAX CORPSE LIFETIME 0 ticks 0 ticks
victims still alive at round end 0 0
onBotDeath fires for every death, including non-round-ending ones. The
API-level event-drop mechanism IS real (test_event_drop_mechanism.nim proves
it: ekBotDeath is not in isCritical and MAX_EVENTS_AGE=2) - the bot simply
never falls far enough behind for it to trigger (max lag 1 turn).
Removed:
- reconcileWithServer + ReconcilePersistTicks/mismatchTicks/sawServerAlive
(uncommitted, and ON BY DEFAULT despite the premise being false). Its own
comment admitted a shorter window once KILLED A LIVE ENEMY ("it fired three
more times after the tracker marked it dead") - a latent mis-prune path
defending against a bug that does not exist.
- The radar's CorpseTicks=40 filter and the same-class age>60 filter in
recordRadarStats, both carrying the false comment. Removal changes no real
behaviour: buildState feeds the radar enemyTracker.allAlive(), so a dead
enemy never reaches computeScan.
Kept:
- The TR_TRACKER_PROBE instrument (default OFF), which produced the table above.
- test_event_drop_mechanism.nim - the drop mechanism is a genuine library
behaviour worth guarding.
- isAlive/aliveCount on the tracker.
Added: docs/tracker_death_events.md (the durable negative, so this is not
re-invented a third time) and test_enemy_tracker_death.nim (13 checks) in place
of the test for the deleted feature.
Guards: test_gun_harness 39/39, test_vbullet_metric 11, test_power_selection 3,
test_adaptive_radar 41/41, test_event_drop_mechanism 6, test_enemy_tracker_death
13, acceptance 12/12, ModularBot compiles.
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SirStone
|
c091bf3c34 |
harness: upgrade to server 1.3.1, keep 0.35.5 selectable, re-baseline
All prior measurements ran on server 0.35.5. The default is now the current 1.3.1 jar, with the legacy jar kept and switchable via TR_SERVER_JAR (no code edit). test_gauntlet_5bots.nim no longer clobbers a caller's TR_SERVER_JAR - it used to putEnv() unconditionally, so an override was silently ignored. RE-BASELINE (controlled RulesProbe battle, stationary bot, powers 0.1/0.5/1/2/3): dimension 1.3.1 0.35.5 verdict bullet damage per hit 0.4/2/4/10/16 identical SAME bullet speed (20-3p) within noise within noise SAME post-fire gun heat (1+p/5) identical identical SAME cooling 0.1/tick 0.1/tick SAME bulletDamage SCORE exactly 100/round 104..113/round DIFFERENT bulletKillBonus (20%) 20/round 20..23/round DIFFERENT LOUD FINDING - a SCORING rule changed, physics did not: 0.35.5 credits OVERKILL to bulletDamage (the killing bullet's full damage even past 0 energy); 1.3.1 caps it at the energy actually removed. Every 0.35.5 score is therefore inflated ~5-6%, and bulletKillBonus inherits the inflation. Gauntlet totals shift accordingly (SittingDuck 1936 -> 1800, WaveSurfer 1886 -> 1669). Consequence: score-based numbers recorded on 0.35.5 are NOT comparable to 1.3.1. Our gun A/Bs used real HIT RATE, not score, so those conclusions stand. Runner 1.0.2 (unchanged, no newer one on the box) is measured compatible with the 1.3.1 server. Note TrBattleCapture uses the runner's EMBEDDED server, which is 1.0.2 - so the capture path still runs an older engine than the gauntlet. Also re-ran acceptance_offline_vs_online on the new default: 12/12. |
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SirStone
|
18f778056b |
gun selector: hysteresis measured NEGATIVE, shipped at the lightest setting
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. |
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SirStone
|
68e0375be2 |
feat(radar): adaptive melee radar sweeps only the arc containing all enemies
Replaces melee_scan in the rack. melee_scan spun the radar at the 45 deg/tick cap unconditionally, so a full 360 deg revolution took 8 ticks and every enemy was scanned roughly every 8 ticks. The new module starts with the same full spin, and once it is SURE it has covered every enemy it sweeps back and forth over only the minimal covering arc of all enemy bearings. MEASURED, real melees via the bridge, per-enemy onScannedBot counts: 3-bot melee (2 enemies): 29.6 -> 61.1 scans/100 melee-ticks (2.06x) 4-bot melee (3 enemies): 36.0 -> 75.7 scans/100 melee-ticks (2.10x) Covering-arc widths observed: mostly <90 deg in the 2-enemy case, up to 240 deg in the 3-enemy case, so the gain shrinks as the arc widens - and at the ExitTrackWidthDeg=300 fallback it degenerates to exactly the old full spin, so there is no loss when narrowing would not help. TRADEOFF, recorded rather than hidden: a wider arc legitimately takes longer to traverse, so the freshness window costs 5-7 points (fresh<=16: 93-95% vs 98-100%) and more at fresh<=8 (75-76% vs 97-100%). More scans per enemy, at slightly staler individual fixes. DESIGN: acquisition spins 360 until every live known enemy was seen within FreshnessTicks=16 (two revolutions of slack), no new id appeared, and the live count matches getEnemyCount(); that must hold FreshStreakTicks=3 consecutive ticks. Tracking then bang-bang sweeps the wraparound-aware covering arc (350+10 -> 20 through 0) widened by MarginDeg=20 each end, at up to 45 deg/tick. Fallbacks return to acquisition: any stale enemy, any new id, or an arc >= 300 deg. Enter 270 / Exit 300 gives 30 deg of hysteresis so it cannot flap. Adds EnemyInfo.lastSeenTick (additive) so coverage is judged on staleness, not mere knowledge - without it an enemy that slipped behind the sweep would keep contributing its own stale bearing, which is self-confirming. The offline range now round-trips that field from the fixture 'lst'. COMPANION FIX, and it matters: the radar-mode switch used the TRACKER's known enemy count, so in melee the bot saw one enemy before scanning the second, locked to 1v1, and the melee radar never ran at all. Now uses getEnemyCount() (server truth), so melee mode persists until one enemy is genuinely left. 41 new unit checks (wraparound arcs, straddle at 0/360, single/empty enemies, the 45 deg/tick cap, every phase transition and fallback). melee_scan is kept but marked DEPRECATED; nothing in the rack imports it. Non-regression: 33 gun-harness checks, vbullet metric, power selection, and 12/12 offline==online acceptance all pass. |
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SirStone
|
d3b3c28cdf |
fix(adversaries): migrate to bot-api 1.0.7 - kills an intermittent crash that corrupted measurements
Four of the five adversaries imported the OLD package (tankroyale_botapi 1.0.1); only SittingDuck used robocode_tankroyale_botapi 1.0.7, which is what the rest of the repo requires. A previous report claimed OscillatorBot was already on 1.0.7 - that was WRONG, and OscillatorBot turned out to crash the MOST (8 SIGSEGVs in the first reproduction, 15 in its historical /tmp logs). THE CRASH, reproduced with an identical stack in every case: botThreadEntry -> run -> adversary run -> go -> dispatchPendingEvents -> tankroyale_botapi-1.0.1/event_queue.nim(89) addEvent -> realloc/rawDealloc -> SIGSEGV Counts, old API: 60 melee battles x 8 rounds gave RandomMover 1, PatternMover 3, WaveSurfer 0, OscillatorBot 8; 6 battles x 6 rounds vs SittingDuck gave 4/2/0/3. ROOT CAUSE: the main->bot event hand-off. 1.0.1 passes a lock-protected seq[BotEvent] (signalTick writes gPendingEvents, dispatchPendingEvents copies it under lock). 1.0.7 uses a Channel[seq[BotEvent]] (send(move(pending)) / tryRecv). The old path copied string-bearing BotEvent payloads across threads every tick, churning ORC refcounts on the shared heap until the freelist was corrupted. 1.0.7's own source documents this as the gdb-confirmed fix. WHY IT MATTERED MORE THAN IT LOOKED: the crash silently corrupted measurements. Against a stationary duck, crash contamination inflated WaveSurfer's rest fraction from 12.4% (clean) to 20.7%; in a focused run the server logged 'Bot left: OscillatorBot' while the game continued and its score stopped growing. So every gauntlet run tonight was fighting adversaries that were partially dead - which is a second, independent reason the user's instinct that these bots were bugged was correct, and why they should not be used as a measurement baseline. (The per-gun REAL hit rates are unaffected: those came from DrussGT battles.) FIX: all four migrated to robocode_tankroyale_botapi 1.0.7. NO API adaptations were needed beyond the module rename - every symbol these bots use is identical in 1.0.7, verified by diffing the two packages (constants/utils/json_parse/ schemas semantically identical; the movement and intent procs in bot.nim are byte-identical). The .nimble files now require robocode_tankroyale_botapi. VERIFIED: 120 melee battles x 8 rounds plus 6x6 vs SittingDuck -> 0 SIGSEGV in all four stderr logs (0 bytes). Behaviour unchanged: sub-1% absolute drift in mean speed, rest fraction, reversal rate, mean range and perpendicular fraction, all within run-to-run spread; the one >=3-sigma flag (WaveSurfer perpendicular relative to DrussGT) was isolated against a stationary opponent and shown to be the chaotic closed loop, not the migration. test_wavesurfer_velocity passes 7/7. NOT migrated, reported only: GotoTest_garage, OscillatorBot_garage (archived copy), PPO_Bot_garage, QBot_garage, SAC_LSTM_Bot_garage - older experiment garages, left alone deliberately. |
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SirStone
|
ab35540035 |
fix(logging): [config] reported a stale gun - it printed before selection ran
The user spotted this from the game itself: the [config] line always said
gun=HeadOn while the in-game turret and bullet COLOURS varied. The colours are
set at the selection site, so they were truthful and the log was not.
MEASURED, one 2-round battle, same process:
[config] output : 6 lines, ALL gun=HeadOn
tracker selection : Displace 25.1%, HeadOn 20.8%, Pattern 15.5%,
KNN 14.1%, Tsetlin 6.3%, WallBounce 6.1%, ...
Root cause: printConfig did GunNames[bot.currentGun] but EVERY call site ran
before the tick's gun selection - onRoundStarted right after currentGun = 0
(so HeadOn by construction), and the target/radar-change prints. The selection
that sets currentGun is ~490 lines later in the same tick. radarMode and
currentTargetId ARE updated before those sites, which is exactly why the radar
and target columns looked plausible while the gun column did not.
WHERE IT CAME FROM: git history shows commit
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SirStone
|
1e8f0d342a |
fix(adversaries): the launchers ran STALE binaries - this is why the earlier fix never took effect
P0. Three of the five launchers ran ./<Bot> (a tracked binary at the bot root) while config.nims sets outdir=out and both the test framework's compileBots and a manual 'nim c src/<Bot>.nim' write to out/. SittingDuck and OscillatorBot correctly ran ./out/<Bot>; RandomMover, PatternMover and WaveSurfer did not. cmp confirms the root and out binaries differed for all three. Consequence: the previous session's adversary fixes were compiled into out/ and never executed. Every gauntlet and every capture ran the OLD code. This is almost certainly why the user's instinct that these bots were still bugged was correct while the code claimed otherwise. Fixed by pointing all five launchers at ./out/<Bot>, and by deleting the three stale root binaries so the trap cannot recur. Verified end to end through the booter: WaveSurfer went from standing still 96.2% of ticks with a 1398-tick longest standstill, to rest 12.3% / mean speed 6.69 / longest zero run 18 / perpendicular 0.845. Also honours GUN_STATS_PATH in test_gauntlet_5bots.nim (same knob ModularBot reads) so pooled gauntlet runs append to one file instead of clobbering the default. NOTE for a follow-up: the out/ binaries are still TRACKED build artifacts, which is the same class of hazard that caused this. Untracking them (as was done for ModularBot_garage/ModularBot) would remove the failure mode entirely. |
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SirStone
|
c214abcfa8 |
fix(adversaries): repair four of the five sparring bots
The user suspected these were bugged. They were, and the verdicts are not uniform - three genuinely broken, one merely sloppy, one fine: - WaveSurfer: GENUINELY BUGGED, worst of the five. (a) The enemy velocity decomposition was sin/cos SWAPPED - enemyVx used sin and enemyVy used cos, while Tank Royale is 0 deg = East, CCW+, so it must be cos for X and sin for Y. Its linear-prediction gun was aiming at a reflected position. (b) The wall escape flipped strafeDir on EVERY tick the bot was inside the wall margin, so instead of turning away it flip-flopped in place: measured standing still (speed < 0.5) for 96.2% of ticks with a longest continuous standstill of 1398 ticks. Fixed with a hysteretic wall-escape selection plus a corner escape, dead enemyLastDir removed, and per-round state reset. AFTER, measured through the booter: rest 12.3%, mean speed 6.69, full speed 79.7%, longest zero run 18, perpendicular 0.845 / radial 0.012 - it now actually strafes. Gun sanity: lead error 1.0 px vs 106 px for head-on on a constant-velocity target; lead gun 45.8% hits vs 29.3% for head-on. - PatternMover: GENUINELY BUGGED. Real deadlock - it decremented its step counter by the REQUESTED amount while issuing setTargetSpeed(8), so against a wall the counter never reached 0, advanceStep never ran and it was stuck forever (309-tick standstill). Now counts down by ACTUAL distance/turn with a STALL_LIMIT watchdog and steers toward the arena centre. Standstill 309 -> 19 ticks; full-speed ticks 10.0% -> 28.4%. - OscillatorBot: GENUINELY BUGGED, milder. No wall handling at all, so it ground along walls 53.4% of ticks and could pin in a corner. Added wall steering that preserves the fixed 25-tick reversal cadence. Wall-band 53.4% -> 18.6%, mean wall distance 72 -> 119. - RandomMover: merely sloppy, not broken. Its turn intent saturated against the speed-dependent limit (18.4% of moving ticks clamped) and the fire gate was a very loose 10 deg. Now clamps to calcMaxTurnRate and fires within 3 deg. Saturation 18.4% -> 3.9%. - SittingDuck: FINE. Speed 0 for 100% of ticks, zero shots. Left untouched - it is a duck by design. Adds test_wavesurfer_velocity.nim, a direct assertion that the decomposition is cos/sin and explicitly NOT the swapped form (7 cases). KNOWN ISSUE, not fixed: RandomMover/PatternMover/WaveSurfer import tankroyale_botapi 1.0.1 and intermittently SIGSEGV in tankroyale_botapi/event_queue.nim:89 addEvent, freezing the bot for the rest of the battle. It reproduces on old and new code and never occurs for SittingDuck/ OscillatorBot, which import robocode_tankroyale_botapi 1.0.7. Migrating the three to 1.0.7 would likely fix it and is worth doing - it is a real reliability risk for these as sparring partners. |
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|
SirStone
|
e6653199bb |
fix(shim): make the generated DrussGT bot dir runnable by hand
Running /tmp/tr_bots/DrussGT/DrussGT.sh manually failed with: BotException: Required bot property 'name' is missing. The Tank Royale Java bot API reads bot identity from BOT_* environment variables (EnvVars: BOT_NAME, BOT_VERSION, BOT_AUTHORS, BOT_DESCRIPTION, BOT_HOMEPAGE, BOT_COUNTRY_CODES, BOT_GAME_TYPES, BOT_PLATFORM, BOT_PROG_LANG, BOT_INITIAL_POS). When the TR booter launches the directory it supplies those, derived from the .json - which is why every headless battle worked - but launching the script directly supplies nothing, so the API rejects the handshake. make_botdir.sh now exports them in the generated <dir>.sh (kept in sync with the .json it writes), so the script works standalone as well as under the booter. Verified against a server started for the test: before, the exact error above; after, 'Connected to: ws://localhost:4599' and the server logs 'Bot joined: DrussGT 3.1.4159'. |
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|
SirStone
|
013b9fe01e |
docs: correct the overstated 'inverted metric' claim; record tonight's fixes
Three corrections, all prompted by later measurements: 1. The virtual-vs-real rank correlation is NOT robustly negative. Six independent Spearman measurements now exist (-0.374, +0.335, +0.522, -0.371, -0.073, -0.037) and the sign flips on large samples, so it is near zero on average. The honest headline is that virtual hit rate is a POOR RANKER, not an inverted one. The report said 'not weak - it is inverted' in six places; it now says so in none. The practical conclusion (do not trust it for ranking) is unchanged; the mechanism claimed was wrong. 2. The offline==online acceptance is FIXED, not flaky. Root cause was that the replay spawned gun 13 (TMSelect) while the live rack has it disabled, and the shared VirtualTracker ring is ORDER-SENSITIVE, so gun 13's extra 4 bullets/tick permuted the per-tick resolution order for every other gun and shifted the learning guns' observations. After closing gun 13's ready gate offline the live and offline KNN traces are byte-identical (904/904 lines, empty diff). 5/5 consecutive runs now report 12/12 exact with the death boundary included. Recorded with the lesson: a flaky proof was hiding a real bug. Also records the general A/B confound - disabling a gun removes its 4 spawns/tick from the shared ring, perturbing resolution order for the rest. 3. Pruning was tested and does NOT help, so the verdict for Tsetlin and Displace changes from an implied drop to BELOW OVERALL - KEEP. 15 paired runs: baseline 6.18%, Tsetlin-off 5.76%, Tsetlin+Displace-off 5.46%; paired permutation p=0.57 and p=0.21; distributions completely overlap; a non-surfer control showed no separation. Being below average does not justify removal. Also records the tie-break randomness fix, and quotes run counts with every rate (6.95% over 13 runs vs 6.18% over 15 runs, same binary) rather than presenting a single figure as definitive. |
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|
SirStone
|
4cd5618435 |
fix(test): repair the flaky offline==online acceptance; make the tie-break truly random
TASK 2 - THE FLAKY ACCEPTANCE TEST, root-caused. It was NOT a live/offline boundary race as suspected. The replay spawned gun 13 (TMSelect) while live has EnableTmSelector = false and never does. The shared VirtualTracker ring is ORDER-SENSITIVE, so gun 13's extra 4 bullets/tick shift the ring head and permute the per-tick RESOLUTION ORDER of every other gun. The learning guns append observations in resolution order, so their predictions shifted and produced small hit deltas that moved between runs. Evidence: the first KNN divergence was at rtick=174 with the SAME resolution set merely reordered (live ft133,138,139,142,148,150,151 vs offline ft150,151,133,138,139,142,148); after closing gun 13's ready gate offline the live and offline KNN traces became BYTE-IDENTICAL (diff empty, 904/904 lines). Fix: mirror the live rack in the replay. No tick exclusion, no tolerance loosening. Stability: 5/5 consecutive runs now report 12/12 exact, each with enemyDied=true - the death boundary is included, not excluded. The proof is now real rather than a lucky run. TASK 1 - the tie-break was not random. randomize() was only reached incidentally through initTsetlinGun(), so a rack without Tsetlin had a fixed rand() stream and ties always resolved the same way across process restarts. Added seedSelectorRng() after gun construction, honouring GUN_SELECTOR_SEED. Evidence: unseeded, 6 separate processes gave different pick sequences; with GUN_SELECTOR_SEED=42, 3 processes gave identical sequences. TASK 3 - PRUNING DOES NOT HELP; keep the full rack. 15 PAIRED runs per variant vs DrussGT, 8 rounds, identical seeds: baseline 3238 shots 6.18% (events 6.16%) 200 dmg/run Tsetlin disabled 3522 shots 5.76% (events 5.71%) 197 dmg/run Tsetlin+Displace 3478 shots 5.46% (events 5.37%) 183 dmg/run Paired permutation tests: -0.34pp p=0.57 and -0.70pp p=0.21. Per-run distributions completely overlap (baseline range [2.68, 10.00]; 15/15 and 14/15 runs inside it). A Crazy control showed no separation either. So removing the measured-worst real performers is neutral-to-slightly-negative, and with sd ~1.8pp a definitive claim either way would need far more runs. CORRECTION TO A CLAIM I MADE: the 'virtual metric is INVERTED' finding does NOT reproduce. Job-24 measured Spearman -0.374; this job measures +0.335 over the same 13 guns with a different but equally defensible aggregation. Two opposite signs means the correlation is NOT robustly negative - it is WEAK AND SIGN-UNSTABLE. The honest statement is that virtual hit rate is a poor ranker, not an inverted one. The docs assert the inversion and need correcting. Also adds per-process GUN_STATS_PATH/GUN_SHOTLOG_PATH so concurrent A/B runs do not clobber each other, and an env-gated GUN_RACK_DISABLE for rack A/Bs. All default behaviour is unchanged when the env vars are unset. |
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SirStone
|
19410164f1 |
docs: definitive gun-rack report on real measured numbers
Replaces the stale 2026-09-20 docs, which predated per-gun real attribution, the offline gun range and the DrussGT boss, and whose verdicts were built on virtual hit rates that turned out to be ANTI-correlated with reality. docs/gun_rack_analysis.md (751 lines) covers: the test infrastructure described honestly (offline range with its flaky-acceptance caveat, the 20 fixtures and what each set is good for, the live boss, and the A/B methodology of per-run server-side real hit rate with an explicit overlap test); the virtual-vs-real metric lesson with Spearman -0.374 and the point-vs-path A/B; per-gun real performance and the 16-rule ranking A/B; the offline per-fixture gun matrix; KEEP/MARGINAL/BELOW verdicts; and the five root-cause bugs with before/after numbers. docs/gun_rack_summary.md (58 lines) is the verdict table plus top actions. The '~230 point' score-noise band that has been steering methodology all night was re-derived from the artifacts rather than asserted: the 13 shipped-config run scores span 175-526, s.d. ~105, i.e. a ~210-point 2-s.d. band. Caveats recorded verbatim rather than softened: the offline==online acceptance is flaky (typically 11/12 on unmodified HEAD), fixtures are perfect-information and therefore optimistic vs live play, per-gun real N is small so single-gun ordering is indicative, the headline numbers come from ONE wave-surfer adversary, and HeadOn must stay despite being lowest because it is the floor fallback (disabling it: 5.08% / 175 dmg vs 6.95% / 251 dmg). |
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SirStone
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2c94dc221a |
test(selector): 16 ranking rules A/B'd against the boss - none beat the shipped config
Added runtime-tunable ranking knobs to the selector, all defaulting to the shipped values so behaviour is byte-identical when unset: GUN_SELECTOR_WINDOW, MINOBS, TIE, FLOOR, POOL, RANK, SHRINK, SEED. rankScore supports mean, Wilson lower bound, UCB, Thompson and shrinkage. Also fixed hitRate's most-recent-N read for sub-WindowSize windows (windowHits). RESULT: NO candidate credibly beat the shipped config. 13 runs x 8 rounds vs DrussGT, 3612 shots, base 6.95% at 251 dmg/run; every candidate's per-run interval overlaps base, and the nominal 'winners' are <=0.6 SE apart on far fewer shots. Kept the shipped default. Valid outcome, recorded plainly. THE FINDING THAT MATTERS MORE: the virtual-bullet ranking is ANTI-correlated with real hit rate - Spearman ~ -0.37 for the shipped config. It is not merely weak, it is INVERTED. The guns with the highest VIRTUAL rates have among the lowest REAL rates: Tsetlin 12.9% virtual / 5.8% real, WallBounce 12.9 / 6.2, StopShot 12.6 / 6.1, AvgLead 12.3 / 7.0 - while Linear sits at 10.2 virtual / 10.7 real and KNN at 7.5 / 9.0. So what carries the selector is the floor/tie HEDGING, not the ranking: removing the floor drops us to 5.08% / 175 dmg. That also kills the 'exploration' hypothesis - every gun spawns virtual bullets every tick, so sampling is uniform and the bottleneck is SIGNAL QUALITY, not under-sampling. FINAL PER-GUN REAL HIT RATE vs DrussGT (13 runs, 3612 shots, overall 6.95%): Linear 10.7 | Circular 9.9 | KNN 9.0 | Pattern 8.6 | Accel 7.3 | AvgLead 7.0 GuessFactor 6.9 | DecayGF 6.4 | WallBounce 6.2 | StopShot 6.1 | Tsetlin 5.8 Displace 5.3 | HeadOn 5.2 Keep: Linear, Circular, KNN, Pattern, Accel, AvgLead. Marginal: GuessFactor, DecayGF, WallBounce, StopShot. Below overall: Tsetlin, Displace, HeadOn - but HeadOn must STAY as the floor fallback, since disabling the floor measurably hurt. CORRECTION TO A CLAIM I HAVE BEEN MAKING: the 12/12 offline==online acceptance is FLAKY. It fails 11/12 on the UNMODIFIED HEAD source (control: KNN 81 online vs 71 offline), and the mismatching gun moves between runs (KNN, then WallBounce) - a live/offline boundary race. So '12/12' was a lucky run, and that proof should be treated as strong-but-not-exact until the race is fixed. This diff does not touch replayFixture/spawnBullets/tickBullets and the selector is never called during replay, so it is pre-existing. SIDE FINDING, not fixed: the shipped live bot never calls randomize(), so the 'random tie-break' is a FIXED sequence across process restarts. Overfitting guard vs a non-surfer (SpinBot): inconclusive - ModularBot fires only 17-31 real shots/run against fast bots because the range-aware firing gate is strict at long range, so the guard has little power. Wilson looked better (18.5% vs 8.6%) but on 70-92 shots with a 5-33% spread. Not evidence either way. |
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SirStone
|
57b2ac3849 |
feat(guns): scale-aware power selection (+52% damage); TM classifier gun built, measured, DISABLED
TASK 2 - power selection, a clear win. bestPower used an ABSOLUTE MinHitRate = 0.40 bar. Measured per-bin virtual rates (rolling-100 fraction) show no bin ever clears 40%, so 11 of 14 guns were stuck at bin 0 (power 1.0) even where higher bins were comparable: Linear p1.0 44% p1.5 39% p2.0 30% p3.0 29% old bin 0 -> new bin 3 Accel p1.0 44% p1.5 40% p2.0 26% p3.0 29% old bin 1 -> new bin 3 Pattern p1.0 50% p1.5 40% p2.0 27% p3.0 12% old bin 1 -> new bin 2 Replaced with a scale-aware PowerBarFrac = 0.50 (a dimensionless FRACTION of the gun's own best bin rate). 13 of 14 selections now pick heavier bullets. Real effect vs DrussGT (8 rounds x 3 runs): hit rate unchanged (7.56% -> 7.47%) but damage dealt +52% (157 -> 239 per run) and rounds end faster. Same accuracy, half the shots, half again more damage. TASK 1 - the TM pattern-classifier gun does NOT earn its slot. It was built as a mixture of experts with a corrected-Granmo TM as a multi-class gate over HeadOn/Linear/Circular/WallBounce/Accel, labelled by which expert's prediction was closest to the actual enemy position (an exact, supervised, per-shot label - no delayed credit). Offline it loses to the best of its OWN experts on essentially every fixture, and against DrussGT it cost real performance: baseline (path+relative) 7.56% real hit rate, damage 157 + power fix 7.47%, damage 239 + power fix + TM gun 5.59%, damage 133 The gun was selected on 806 ticks and fired 24 real shots at 4.2%. So the tree ships with EnableTmSelector = false: code and wiring kept intact for re-enabling, but it is not in the active rack. Worth recording from the clause dump: the gate DOES latch onto meaningful structure. On energy-threshold-turner, HeadOn's clauses key on the energy bits (the rule's own driving variable) while Circular keys on distance/velocity. So the TM is learning something real and interpretable - it simply cannot beat 'always pick the best expert'. Root cause (INFERRED): the closest-expert label is noisy because several experts are near-tied, and under the path metric the winner varies by power bin while the gate sees one shared per-tick input, so a one-vs-rest gate over a saturated 870-bit clause space has no margin to exploit. (Zero-padding the 2-frame window was tried first and saturated every clause at 256-755 included literals; alternating the two real frames fixed that.) Also factors the corrected feedback into an exported tmLearnDir and exports the encoding/TM primitives; the Tsetlin tests still reproduce the documented mean=13.8 included literals, so the refactor is behaviour-preserving. Verified: 33/33 guard checks, tsetlin tests green, metric checks green, new power-selection guard green (13/14 selections change; relative bar still picks bin 1 and not bin 3 for a [30,25,12,5]% profile), 12/12 offline==online acceptance under the shipped default. |
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SirStone
|
dea4dcb574 |
feat(gun_harness): scale-aware selector thresholds; default = path + relative
The selection thresholds were calibrated for a rate scale that does not exist.
MEASURED on an exact offline replay of a fogged live WorldState vs DrussGT
(1397 selection ticks), the 0.10 absolute floor fires on 53.0% of point-metric
ticks and forces HeadOn, which has a REAL hit rate of 2.0-4.4% - worst or
near-worst of 13 guns. HeadOn's selection share: 69.1% (abs+point) -> 43.5%
(rel+point). My earlier claim that the floor fires ALWAYS is REFUTED - it is
53%, because bestRate is a max over gun x bin and a >=50-sample bin
occasionally clears 10%. The mechanism is confirmed; the literal statement was
not.
Scale-aware mode (GUN_SELECTOR_MODE, absolute|relative, default relative):
RelTieMargin = 0.20 dimensionless FRACTION of bestRate, replacing the
fixed 2pp band so the band scales with the metric
FloorPeakFrac = 0.25 the floor fires iff bestRate < 0.25 * peakRateRef,
SelectorWindow = 256 where peakRateRef is the field-best rate over the last
256 selection ticks - keeping the original 'don't trust
a collapsed field' purpose but only when the field is
bad RELATIVE TO ITS OWN RECENT BEST, and counting only
guns with >= MinObsBeforeCompete samples so cold-start
100% spikes cannot pin HeadOn
also pools the rate over power bins instead of taking the max over bins, so
one lucky bin no longer wins
absolute mode is preserved byte-for-byte for rollback.
A/B vs DrussGT, real server hit rate, 3 runs x 10 rounds per config, one frozen
binary:
absolute+point 3.66 / 2.45 / 5.01 pooled 3.76%
absolute+path 7.55 / 8.21 / 6.83 pooled 7.57%
relative+point 7.66 / 6.18 / 5.79 pooled 6.59%
relative+path 7.15 / 7.55 / 6.90 pooled 7.21%
absolute+point is SEPARATED from all three (p < 0.0001); the other three
OVERLAP each other (p = 0.18-0.64). So the METRIC is the dominant lever and
under path the two threshold models are statistically tied.
DEFAULT SET: metric = path, thresholds = relative. absolute+path was nominally
0.35pp higher but indistinguishable (p = 0.64); relative is the principled
scale-aware fix, is the only model that works under BOTH metrics, and prevents
the point-metric catastrophe if anyone switches back. Shipping absolute would
ship the accidental side-effect this work exists to remove.
STILL NOT SOLVED: the selector remains only a moderate ranker.
Spearman(virtual rank, real rank) is 0.52 for the winning config, 0.36 pooled
for path and 0.04 for point - and it is INCONSISTENT across run sets. The
metric switch won by de-selecting HeadOn, not by ranking guns better. That is
the next problem.
TASK B, report only: do NOT drive selection from raw real hit rates yet.
Only the selected gun fires, so unselected guns get near-zero real shots
(GuessFactor 20, Linear 24 vs HeadOn 733); noise is fatal (n=470 at p=10% gives
+/-2.8pp, most guns n<200 gives +/-5pp+ across a 3-15% spread); and real rate is
conditional on when the gun was selected. A blended signal with forced
exploration and shrinkage is defensible in principle but needs thousands of
shots per gun across many battles. Real rate is best used OFFLINE as the
evaluation metric - which is exactly what this A/B did.
RELATED BUG FLAGGED, not fixed: MinHitRate = 0.40 in bestPower is on the same
wrong scale - no bin ever clears 40%, so once every bin has data, power
selection falls back to bin 0 (power 1.0) late in a round.
Verified: 33/33 guard checks, 11/11 metric checks, tsetlin green, 12/12
offline==online acceptance under the shipped default, run_range rc=0 over 20
fixtures. Adds analyze_selector.nim to measure floor/tie/bestRate/HeadOn-share
per config on any fixture.
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SirStone
|
3b5d70b7c3 |
feat(gun_harness): runtime metric switch + A/B proving the point metric mis-selects
Adds GUN_VBULLET_METRIC (point|path, default point = unchanged behaviour) so the virtual-bullet hit model can be selected at runtime with no rebuild. Both the live tracker and the offline replay read the same value, so the 12/12 offline==online acceptance holds under EITHER setting (verified for both). A/B AGAINST THE LIVE BOSS, real server-side hit rate as ground truth, 5 battles x 12 rounds per metric on one frozen binary: point 4660 shots / 219 hits = 4.70% (per-run 3.16-5.53) path 4834 shots / 359 hits = 7.43% (per-run 6.55-8.24) The distributions DO NOT OVERLAP: path's worst run beats point's best run. +2.73pp, +58% relative, z = 5.56, p < 0.0001. Range distributions were identical (~460-478 px), so this is not a range confound. MECHANISM - and this is the important part. The gain is SELECTION, not better gun learning. Under the point model every gun's virtual rate is compressed into 0.6-4.4%, so HeadOn sits inside the 2pp tie margin and takes 72.6% of selection ticks / 76.9% of shots - while HeadOn is 11th of 13 by REAL hit rate (2.3%). The path model widens the band to 4.7-13.7% and ranks HeadOn 10th, so its shot share falls to 35.9% and Pattern/Accel/WallBounce get picked instead. Counterfactual: applying the point model's per-gun real rates to the path model's shot mix yields 7.65%, i.e. essentially the whole observed gain. So the selector, not the guns, is where the win lives. PER-GUN REAL HIT RATE vs DrussGT (path mix, the answer to 'which guns are worth keeping'): WallBounce 10.8, Pattern 10.5, Accel 10.0, Displace 9.3, Circular 9.2, AvgLead 8.5, KNN 5.7, StopShot 5.2, GuessFactor 3.7, Tsetlin 2.9. Per-gun N is small (hundreds of shots) so single-gun ordering is indicative, not definitive. TWO CAVEATS, recorded because they undercut a naive reading: 1. One adversary. DrussGT is a wave surfer and HeadOn is genuinely bad against surfers, so part of this may be matchup-specific. 2. The path model is NOT a better general ranker. Spearman(virtual rank, real rank) is 0.52 under point vs -0.04 under path. It wins by accidentally fixing HeadOn's mis-rank, not by ranking guns better. A more durable fix is to address the selection logic directly - which is the next job. Also adds a focused guard test (test_vbullet_metric) covering parsing/default, a receding-target point-miss/path-hit, a perpendicular-target path-miss, and replay determinism. Verified: 33 guard checks, 12/12 acceptance under both metrics, tsetlin tests green, range 34.3% (point, unchanged) / 50.8% (path). |
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SirStone
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e2ca2fc7d8 |
fix(guns): recover the DrussGT regression with a radial-fraction range blend
The previous fix (learn the residual against a constant-velocity base) was structurally right but cost us on real wave-surfing movement: GF 108 -> 55, KNN 101 -> 74 on the classic DrussGT captures. Root cause: the linear base is a poor model for a surfer, so the residual histogram is noisier than the old total-lead histogram. FIX: blend the RANGE between a radial-only forecast and the geometric one by radialFrac (the fraction of recent per-tick motion that is radial), keeping the constant-velocity bearing. dist = radialDist + rf*(linearDist - radialDist). New VelocityTracker in common_libs/guns/lead_forecast.nim; the window default is 32 and results were identical at 16 and 40, so it is not tightly tuned. Nine candidate bases were measured and rejected WITH NUMBERS rather than by argument, which is why I trust the winner: velocity scaling 0.8 recovers DrussGT but destroys wall-bounce 241 -> 20 radial-only range excellent DrussGT, wall-bounce 241 -> 140 short-window averaged vel worse than both bases outright hard reversal/speed gates help DrussGT, lose nothing, but weaker than blend radial-fraction blend best on BOTH <- shipped Result (hits per 2000; classic-5 = classic DrussGT captures, tr-5 = the new closed-loop TR captures, synth-10 = the rest): base classic-5 GF/DGF tr-5 GF/DGF synth-10 GF/DGF current(prefix) 108 / 108 41 / 39 1302 / 1302 linear(postfix) 55 / 76 9 / 4 2702 / 2692 BLEND 171 / 100 86 / 87 2717 / 2703 Strictly better than both on classic-5 GF and on every synthetic bucket. The one figure below the old base is classic-5 DecayGF (108 -> 100, -8/2000, within noise) and that is stated plainly rather than hidden. TASK B - enemy energy in learners. KNN gains an 8th feature, enemyEnergy/100, on a FIXED [0,1] scale (not min-max) because threshold behaviour keys off absolute energy. Honest result: it is NEUTRAL on the target fixture (77 vs 77) and roughly neutral in aggregate. The base change, not the feature, moved that fixture. Tsetlin already encoded enemyEnergy and now scores 88/400 on energy-threshold-turner against Linear's 43/400 - a 2x margin, which is the 'can a TM learn a high-level pattern' question answered in gun form. TASK C - is the virtual-bullet metric itself faithful? Quantified: scoring the bullet's PATH against BotRadius instead of the single point at aim distance raises every gun by +31% (GF) to +86% (HeadOn), so the current model is PESSIMISTIC, and it RE-RANKS materially: Linear 9th -> 6th, AvgLead 7th -> 3rd, GuessFactor 4th -> 9th, DecayGF 6th -> 12th. The 12/12 offline==online acceptance still holds under the path model (verified with a temporary env hook driving both sides), so no red flag. VERDICT: do NOT switch. The point model is the standard virtual-bullet PREDICTION-ACCURACY fitness - the bullet must arrive at the predicted point at the right time - while the path model measures hypothetical hit chance against a target that never dodges, and in open-loop fixtures it over-credits directional guns (HeadOn 35% on DrussGT, 100% on constant-velocity) for exactly that reason. The models differ materially but the current one is not shown to be unfaithful FOR ITS PURPOSE. Because the metric drives gun SELECTION, this is now being A/B'd against real hit rate versus the live DrussGT boss, which is the only ground truth we have. Verified: 20 fixtures 35636/104000 (34.3%); 33 guard checks; 12/12 acceptance; tsetlin tests green; live gauntlet 5/5. |
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SirStone
|
17c99f542f |
feat(fixtures): closed-loop DrussGT captures from real Tank Royale battles
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.
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SirStone
|
7f706e5b14 |
fix(guns): GF family aimed at the wrong RADIUS, not the wrong angle
The entire GuessFactor family scored 0% on clean circular and wall-bounce trajectories. Two hypotheses were on the table and BOTH were wrong: - MEA range too narrow / edge clamping: REFUTED. Measured 0 clamped shots out of 837/849/957, required offsets peak at ~33 deg against MEA 28.1-46.7 deg, and the 8 in arcsin(8/bulletSpeed) is correct (it is the max robot SPEED, not the hit radius). Changing it to BotRadius=18 would have coarsened resolution for nothing. - Peak selection: REFUTED. A sweep of every constant GF value showed the ORACLE-BEST constant offset on the original gun was only 6% circular, 4% wall-bounce, 7.5% random-walk. No peak choice could have done better. The learning path was fine too: ~850-960 observations per fixture, 0 starved waves, well-populated histograms. REAL CAUSE: the GF family aimed at the FIRE-TIME distance. The virtual-bullet metric resolves a bullet at the AIM-POINT distance and scores that single point against the enemy's position on that tick, so with any radial target motion the bullet stops at the wrong radius and misses even with a perfect angle. Angle-only prediction is structurally unscoreable under this metric. FIX: give the GF family a self-consistent constant-velocity forecast as its base reference (new common_libs/guns/lead_forecast.nim, which iterates the flight time to the same fixed point circular.nim uses), so the histogram learns the RESIDUAL against that forecast and the aim point lands at the right radius. Applied to guess_factor, decay_gf and knn_gun. Same defect fixed in Linear: it did a one-shot dist/bulletSpeed extrapolation and never iterated its flight time. The oracle sweep proves the structural fix, independently of tuning: the best achievable constant GF moved 6% -> 20% (circular), 4% -> 57% (wall-bounce), 7.5% -> 49% (random-walk). MEASURED, all 15 fixtures: total 39.0% -> 44.4% (30399 -> 34654 hits). circular GF 6 -> 23, DecayGF 6 -> 21 wall-bounce GF 0 -> 60.2, DecayGF 0 -> 60.2 constant-vel GF 26 -> 100, DecayGF 26 -> 100, KNN 26 -> 100, Linear 87 -> 100 random-walk GF 0 -> 53, DecayGF 0 -> 52, Linear 24 -> 53 StraightLine GF 8 -> 77, DecayGF 8 -> 77 Non-regression: 33 guard checks pass, the range's 12/12 offline==online acceptance still PASSES, tsetlin tests green, live gauntlet 5/5. HONEST TRADE-OFF, recorded rather than hidden: on the 5 real DrussGT wave-surfing captures the GF family REGRESSES - GuessFactor 108 -> 55, DecayGF 108 -> 76, KNN 101 -> 74 hits per 2000. The linear base is a poor model for a surfer, so the residual histogram is noisier than the old total-lead histogram. Linear itself improved there (95 -> 105). The synthetic range and the live gauntlet both improved, and the structural bug is provably fixed, so this was judged worth the cost - but recovering the DrussGT regression is the next job, not something to wave away. |
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SirStone
|
8e2be6a4c6 |
feat(tools): the real DrussGT now plays and wins Tank Royale battles
The unmodified DrussGT.jar connects, wave-surfs, fires and beats every adversary we have. 5 rounds each, all rounds won: SpinBot 542-16, Corners 823-4, Crazy 604-0, RamFire 900-0, ModularBot 506-72. It is genuinely surfing, not drifting or stalling. Movement statistics against the classic captures, same metrics, same analyzer: opp perp TR/classic reversing TR/cl median range TR/cl SpinBot 0.967 / 0.962 0.466 / 0.464 462 / 402 Corners 0.894 / 0.920 0.462 / 0.419 520 / 504 Crazy 0.841 / 0.829 0.527 / 0.439 370 / 378 RamFire 0.762 / 0.651 0.533 / 0.417 326 / 283 ModularBot 0.956 / - 0.466 / - 453 / - Every round starts moving within 3-11 ticks and runs at 75-82% full speed. Implemented: the classic remaining-quantity motion model (delegated to the TR Bot's own Nat-Pavasant model - identical constants: accel 1, decel -2, max 8, body turn 10-0.75|v|, gun 20, radar 45 - so getDistanceRemaining and getTurnRemaining are exactly self-consistent with what is emulated); event synthesis with classic ordering; bullet identity via object identity; gun heat; rounds; radar cadence; firing translation; and the ThreadManager landmine is killed by installing a no-op IThreadManagerBase in ContainerBase.instance (verified: without it 'RobotException: ThreadManager cannot be null!' kills the bot thread; with it the write succeeds). Also adds TrBattleCapture, an observer that dumps per-tick state in the SAME JSONL fixture format as the classic capture, so legacy bots can be captured from Tank Royale battles too. HONEST DIVERGENCES (README section 5.9): the TR server moves along the PRE-turn heading and then turns, while classic aligns displacement with the POST-turn heading, so the analyzer's conversion error is ~1.5 deg rather than 0.000 deg; distanceRemaining decrements by target speed rather than actual distance; collision clamping differs; BulletMissedEvent can fire less often because age-expiry has no TR event; bulletId is a local temp id; StatusEvent/onPaint/SkippedTurnEvent are never delivered. Physics fidelity diverges by construction - expect to retune. EnergyDomeWorker (the bullet shield) is off by default: its precise bullet-detection warm-up makes round 1 up to 79% stationary vs 35% in classic. Rounds 2+ match classic closely with it on, but the pure surfer is the consistent path. DRUSSGT_SHIELD=1 re-enables it. Jars remain out of git. |
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SirStone
|
d5061ee215 |
test(range): restore the 12/12 offline==online proof; measure TM clause readability
Task 1 - the acceptance proof was unrunnable because RecordWorldState was a
compile-time const set to false. It is now a RUNTIME switch
(let RecordWorldState* = existsEnv("TR_RECORD_WORLDSTATE")), default OFF, so
ordinary runs write no fixture, and acceptance_offline_vs_online.nim enables
it for the battle it spawns and clears it afterwards. Restored and run twice:
12/12 deterministic guns match exactly (128-tick and 546-tick battles), with
Tsetlin reported separately as stochastic. Both nimble build variants clean.
Task 2 - does a compact encoding turn the TM's 99.35% into a READABLE rule?
Measured across window sizes (fixed seed, no tuning):
frames TEST acc eff.lits/clause firing clauses counterfactual low/high/mean
10 99.35% 152.8 37 100/24/62.4%
3 95.94% 54.9 35 96/20/58.6%
2 99.48% 39.6 38 95/25/60.7%
1 98.30% 19.2 45 100/24/62.3%
So 2 frames is strictly better than 10 on BOTH axes: +0.13 accuracy for 4x
smaller clauses. The 3-frame dip is non-monotonic and left unexplained rather
than smoothed over.
A readable rule WAS partially recovered. Five clauses carry the exact Gray
form !g10 ^ !g9 ^ !g8; g10 is inert in this data, so the effective rule is the
2-literal proposition !g9 ^ !g8, i.e. energy < 25.6. That is a genuine
threshold in readable propositional form - but at 25.6, NOT the labelled 30,
because 256 is a power-of-two Gray boundary expressible in two literals while
300 needs a longer conjunction. The TM found the nearest SIMPLE threshold.
The honest caveat: that threshold is not the ensemble's decision mechanism.
The counterfactual follow rate (high 24%, mean 62.3%) is statistically
identical at 1, 2 and 10 frames, so compactness did not make the model read
energy - its vote is carried by co-occurring bearing/velocity/heading/wall
literals. Also identified: clauses containing all 11 Gray energy bits are
satisfied at exactly one raw value (50, the dataset floor), so they are
'energy has hit the floor' detectors, not thresholds.
Methodological fix worth keeping: the earlier single-frame counterfactual
wrote energy into all 10 frame slots including the zeroed ones, reviving dead
clauses and producing a spurious 2% high-follow rate. setEnergyFrames now
rewrites only the exposed frames; the corrected figure is 24%.
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SirStone
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89370008da |
fix(tsetlin): make the TM actually learn - saturation 714 -> 13.8 literals/clause
The gun has never contributed anything: Tsetlin.vHits was byte-for-byte equal to Linear.vHits in every measured round of every run, because its learned correction was always exactly 0. Six diagnosed defects fixed, plus one that was required to make the first one work: 1. Type I now conditions on the clause output. It previously rewarded included true literals unconditionally, omitting Granmo's (c=0, lk=1) -> toward Exclude counter-force, so true literals ratcheted toward Include forever. This was the root cause of the saturation. 2. Type II was unreachable dead code: its guard required cOut==1 AND lits[lit]==0 AND st>0 (included), but cOut==1 guarantees every included literal is 1. Its direction was wrong too - it should increment EXCLUDED false literals when the clause fires. 3. Resource allocation restored: Granmo's (T - clip(v,-T,T))/(2T) target replaces |error|/(2*RESID_MAX); TM_T was only an output normaliser. 4. Label baseline fixed - the factor-2 shrink. predX = linearX + cx, so the label was delta - cx while the learner's output IS cx, giving error = delta - 2cx and a fixed point of cx = delta/2: HALF the needed correction even with perfect feedback. TmTrace now stores linearX/linearY and training uses delta. 5. Hits no longer zero their label (a hit means |miss| < 18px, not 0). 6. The enemy-energy feature was duplicated - tmEncodeFrame passed state.selfEnergy with a stale comment claiming enemyEnergy was absent, while WorldState.enemyEnergy exists. Enemy-energy rules were literally unrepresentable. 7. REQUIRED EXTRA: tmEvalClause now implements Granmo Eq. 6 - an all-Exclude clause outputs 1 during learning and 0 during classification. Without it, fix #1 deadlocks every clause at empty. MEASURED EFFECT (energy-threshold-turner fixture, seed 1): mean included literals per active clause 714.0 -> 13.8 active clauses 100/100 -> 53/100 nonzero corrections 8/764 -> 708/764 Tsetlin virtual hits (Linear = 27/400) 27/400 -> 69/400 Divergence achieved: offline on 7/8 fixtures, and in a live gauntlet (RandomMover: Tsetlin 199/1200 vs Linear 288/1200, vDropped=vStarved=0). Tsetlin now LEARNS but is not yet competitive with Linear - the regression head is untuned, flagged as follow-up rather than claimed as a win. Also ignores compiled test harnesses that have no file extension, which the existing '**/tests/test_*' rule misses. |
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SirStone
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e0bfa9b5e1 |
feat(tools): drive the real DrussGT jar outside the Robocode engine
The question was whether we can fight a genuine legacy leader bot in Tank Royale. Answer: the API side is now PROVEN, not estimated. KEY FINDING: the classic robocode.* API is a thin delegation layer over a public seam. javap -c shows AdvancedRobot forwarding every call to _RobotBase.peer (IBasicRobotPeer/IAdvancedRobotPeer), and _RobotBase.setPeer is public final. So we do NOT need to reimplement the API: we reuse the genuine robocode.jar and implement only the 75-method peer interface. Consequences: - DrussGT's 22 sources compile against the real API with ZERO unresolved symbols. (The literal 22-file javac fails only on two PRE-EXISTING duplicate classes - GFRange and Indice are declared both inline in DrussGunDC.java and as standalone files - and the 6 classes that ship without source. The jar supplies all of them, so a shim never cares.) - Runtime smoke test PASSES: the unmodified DrussGT.jar is loaded through a child URLClassLoader and driven for 200 synthetic ticks, emitting movement intents every tick and 169 fire requests, with its thread surviving. This is the cheap path to the 'final boss', and it also unlocks the whole roborumble archive rather than one bot. Traps found by measurement: - ScannedRobotEvent's constructor order is (name, energy, bearing, distance, heading, velocity) - NOT heading-before-bearing. The wrong order silently yields distance=0, an immediate KD-tree insert and an NPE in EnemyMoves.predict; it hung the first smoke run. - RobocodeFileOutputStream has a hard engine dependency (resolves IThreadManagerBase via ContainerBase) and throws 'ThreadManager cannot be null!' outside the engine, killing the bot thread. Reached from DrussGT's own contain() error logging, so it must be stubbed. - robocode.RobotDeathEvent is required and was NOT in the predicted API list. - Bullet.equals() is genuinely called for bullet identity, not just getters. REMAINING WORK (README section 5): coordinate rotation DONE, execute()->tick bridge DONE and proven, ThreadManager fix scoped. The main open item is the classic motion model (setAhead distance semantics vs TR speed), estimated 1-3 days, plus event synthesis/ordering, gun heat, bullet identity, round and radar cadence, and firing translation. NO API UNKNOWNS REMAIN. Physics fidelity will still diverge from classic - expect to retune. Jars stay out of git (blocked by tools/robocode_shim/.gitignore); the genuine robocode.jar and DrussGT.jar are referenced from /tmp via ROBOCODE_JAR / DRUSSGT_JAR. |
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SirStone
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76ae6170f8 |
docs(research): portability audit of DrussGT 3.1.4159
Measured hazard counts for a Java->Nim port, with the correction that only 22 of 28 top-level classes ship source (6 do not: 5 in the gun package plus dMove/Scan), so a full port would need a decompiler while a shim would not care at all. Real traps: 193 float / 35 casts / 147 literals / 60 float[] in the movement closure (the danger histogram is float[171] -- porting 32-bit Java floats to Nim's default float64 diverges silently); ~68 non-final statics; and 4 Java single-& sites with side effects, which break under Nim's short-circuiting 'and'. Non-issues, correcting earlier assumptions: 0 sites of %-on-negative (angle normalisation is floor-based) and FastTrig has no lookup tables, it is 7 coefficient-exact polynomials. Movement scoping: 5007 LOC across 14 files, ~4.8-6.1k Nim LOC, 4-8 focused agent-days to first-compiles. It can be ported WITHOUT the gun (data flows movement->gun only), but the harness never routes HitByBullet into movement modules, so the danger bins would never train -- that plumbing is the real blocker, not the translation. |
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SirStone
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4f18c8ce07 |
feat(tools): capture real DrussGT movement from classic Robocode as fixtures
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. |