Gun evaluation previously required a full end-to-end battle (Java server +
battle runner + websocket IPC to 2 bot processes, 50 rounds, ~3.4 min) and
yielded only ~300-900 REAL shots across 13 guns -- far too few to rank
guns, which is why tuning needed many repetitions.
VirtualTracker is already a pure function of (WorldState stream, gun list);
the only reason it needed Java was where WorldState came from. So the range
replays a seq[WorldState] through the SAME tracker: offline and online
scores are the same metric by construction, not an approximation.
ACCEPTANCE TEST (the point of the whole thing): record one live round, replay
it offline, compare per-gun virtual hit rates. 12/12 deterministic guns match
EXACTLY, reproduced twice. Tsetlin is compared separately because tmLearnOne
calls rand(). Getting to 12/12 exposed two real ordering quirks in the live
loop: run() calls go() before the aim/fire block, so tickBullets resolves
against the NEXT tick's scan while the prediction used the previous one; and
if the target dies during that go() the final tick's spawn+resolution is
skipped entirely. The recorder emits an end marker for the second case.
The 5th (selected-gun) predict call was verified to be a no-op.
Measured cost: 8 fixtures (1770 ticks, ~92k virtual bullets, 13 guns) replay
in 2.9 s, ~32k virtual bullets/s -- roughly 70x faster and 100x more samples
than a live gauntlet.
Also adds a per-tick WorldState recorder behind const RecordWorldState
(default off, mirrors the ShotLog idiom) which records the state the bot
ACTUALLY builds, staleness included, rather than true positions -- recording
the latter would hand the guns perfect information and produce flattering
scores.
9 new guard checks (33 total, all passing), including fixture round-trip,
replay determinism, stationary->HeadOn 100%, constant-velocity->Linear>HeadOn,
and the energy-threshold turner crossing at t=41.
Measured, not assumed. With the gate temporarily opened to 20 deg, every
real shot was logged (tick, angle error at fire time, distance, power,
hit) across 3 gauntlets: 2611 shots, 57.3% aggregate. Findings:
- The geometric cone atan(BotRadius/d) is directionally confirmed but a
WEAK lever: even at 0.0-0.1 deg error the hit rate at 400-600px is only
~53-57%, because PREDICTION error dominates alignment error.
- Real effect of tightening the gate: 57.9% -> 68.0% aggregate hit rate
(fixed 0.1 deg), not the 76.9% previously reported -- that was a
high-variance draw (per-rep 62.8/66.4/77.2%).
- The shipped range-aware gate (SafetyFactor 0.6) does NOT beat the fixed
2.0 deg gate on hit rate (55.8% vs 57.9%, ~1.5 sigma, inside noise). It
fires 22-28% more shots and therefore lands more total hits (~509 vs
~434 per rep). No per-adversary score delta exceeded the 300-point
run-to-run noise band, so no config is demonstrably better on score.
Shipped anyway because it is strictly more expressive (a fixed threshold is
the special case), tunable from one const, and physically motivated, but
the honest verdict is recorded in-code: the gate is not the bottleneck.
AimThresholdDeg is removed; shouldFire now takes distPx. Degenerate or NaN
distance falls back to the ceiling rather than dividing by zero.
Also adds a per-shot logger to ModularBot behind 'const ShotLog' so the
measurement above is reproducible, and 10 new guard checks (24 total, all
passing) covering monotonicity, clamping, formula, perfect alignment,
gross misalignment and degenerate distance.
Cross-checked against the server source: the gun fires BEFORE the turn is
applied, so the logged angle error is the true departure error, and
fireAssist auto-aim is off (unset by the Nim API and forced false by
setAdjustRadarForGunTurn).
Four guns cached a whole prediction per tick while predict() is called once
per power bin, so every bin after the first (and the real fired shot, which
shares lastState) reused the power-1.0 lead. Fixed by caching only the
speed-INDEPENDENT derived state and recomputing the lead per requested speed:
- stop_shot: also fixes prevSpeed being written before it was read, which
made abs(speed) < abs(prev) permanently false and the entire
stop-prediction branch unreachable (it was just Linear).
- displacement: the cache key included bulletSpeed, so the guard missed on
all four bins and the 15-tick window advanced ~4x/tick, making the
inferred velocity ~4x too small.
- averaged_lead: tick cache removed outright. pattern_matcher: split into
speed-independent match+path and per-call lead.
FeedbackEvent gains fireTick/powerBin (additive; only virtual_bullets
constructs one) so guns can pair feedback to the exact shot instead of
guessing by coordinates. tsetlin uses it: traces are now keyed exactly by
(fireTick, powerBin) with a 1024-slot ring, and the 10-frame window shifts
at most once per tick (it was shifting ~4-5x/tick, so isWarmedUp tripped
after ~2 ticks).
KNOWN INCOMPLETE: tsetlin still does not diverge from Linear in battle. The
two named bugs are fixed (a 600-tick sim shows trainedShots=2141,
traceMisses=0, and a fixed-input probe converges to a 9.6px correction), but
the TM's clause feedback itself is broken: ~131 of 1740 literals end up
included per clause, so its conjunction never fires. Sweeping TM_S,
TM_N_CLAUSES and a two-branch Type-I update did not change the correction
from 0. Needs a real TM fix or removal, not another bug fix.
First-ever guard tests for the gun selector: common_libs/tests/
test_gun_harness.nim (14 checks, headless, no Java). There were none before,
which is how six broken guns survived a full analysis cycle. Against the
previous HEAD, 5 of these checks FAIL - that is the regression guard.
Wave queues (guess_factor, decay_gf, knn_gun): predict() stored ONE wave
per tick while onResult() popped one per resolved bullet (~4/tick), so the
queue drained to empty within a few dozen ticks, ~3 of every 4 resolutions
returned without learning, and the survivor paired with a same-tick wave
(bearingDelta ~= 0) pinning the histogram at centre. PROOF: GF.vHits ==
HeadOn.vHits and DecayGF.vHits == HeadOn.vHits byte-for-byte in every one
of 50 rounds — the guns had degenerated to HeadOn.
Now each gun keeps a per-bin FIFO with an O(1) head cursor. At most one
push per (tick, bin) so the fire site's 5th predict() call is a no-op, and
onResult pops the oldest wave of its OWN bin via e.bulletPower. Aiming
math untouched (it was already correct: 0 deg = East, CCW+).
maxBullets 2048 -> 8192: the rack spawns 52 bullets/tick so the ring wrapped
every ~39 ticks while a long power-3 shot needs ~90, silently discarding
unresolved bullets and biasing every measured hit rate by range. Added a
droppedBullets counter so a future overflow is measurable, and wavePushes/
waveStarved counters on the three guns. After the fix: vDropped = 0 and
vStarved = 0 across all 48 recorded rounds.
fitnessFor is now exported, deterministic (enemies iterated in ascending id
order) and shared by the selector and the stats dump, replacing a hand-rolled
merge in ModularBot that never advanced its window head.
Round lines gain additive keys: vDropped, vStarved.
Attribution is proven, not guessed: the server assigns a per-round-unique
bulletId (GunEngine.nextBulletId) and stamps the same id on BulletFired,
BulletHitBot, BulletHitWall and BulletHitBullet. Keep a FIFO of fired gun
ids, stamp bulletId -> gunId on onBulletFired, resolve through that map.
Hits are deferred when onBulletHit precedes onBulletFired in the same
turn (client dispatches priority 70 > 60), which recovered 14
unattributed hits. 99.9% of shots and 99.8% of hits attributed.
Stats lines now carry per-gun realShots/realHits/realHitRate; the old
keys and round-level totals are unchanged.
bestPower: a gun with zero observations in every bin previously returned
the HIGHEST bin (power 3.0) because an empty bin satisfied the
'count == 0' clause on the first countdown iteration. Cold guns now
return the lowest bin as the docstring always claimed. Warm-gun path
untouched.
- bestGun: replace first-index-wins argmax with random pick among guns
within TieMargin (2%) of best rate. HeadOn at index 0 was silently
winning every tie, starving Tsetlin/Linear/etc.
- MinObsBeforeCompete 15 -> 50 (Pattern entered competition on noise)
- add MinHitRateFloor 0.10: if no gun clears it, fall back to HeadOn
instead of selecting the best of a bad field
- ModularBot: remove AntiSurfer gun (0% virtual hit rate everywhere),
14 -> 13 guns, renumber ids and selection counters
Gun selector now gates competition: guns with <15 total observations across
all power bins sit out until at least one gun qualifies. Falls back to ungated
selection if no gun reaches threshold, preventing cold-start stalls.
Sliding window increased from 50 to 100 ticks to reduce switching noise.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
SirStone