# Gun Rack Summary — TL;DR

**Date:** 2026-09-21 · **Bot:** ModularBot (13 active guns + 1 disabled TM gate)
**Shipped config:** metric `path`, selector `relative`.
**Ground truth:** server-side real hit rate (events sidecar), per-run, with an
explicit overlap test. Scores are not used — they swing by a couple of hundred
points per run.

**Boss:** the unmodified DrussGT jar through `tools/robocode_shim/`.
**Headline (13 runs vs DrussGT, 3,612 server-side shots): 6.95% real hit rate,
251 dmg/run.**

**The one thing to know:** *virtual hit rate is not a proxy for real hit rate.*
For the shipped config Spearman(virtual rank, real rank) = **−0.374** —
anti-correlated. 16 candidate ranking rules all failed to beat the shipped
config; what works is the selector's floor/tie hedging (removing the floor:
5.08% / 175 dmg vs 6.95% / 251 dmg). Detail: [`gun_rack_analysis.md`](gun_rack_analysis.md).

## Verdict table

| Verdict | Gun | Real % | Virtual % |
|---|---|---:|---:|
| **KEEP** | Linear | 10.7 | 10.2 |
| **KEEP** | Circular | 9.9 | 11.9 |
| **KEEP** | KNN | 9.0 | 7.5 |
| **KEEP** | Pattern | 8.6 | 12.0 |
| **KEEP** | Accel | 7.3 | 12.1 |
| **KEEP** | AvgLead | 7.0 | 12.3 |
| MARGINAL | GuessFactor | 6.9 | 10.3 |
| MARGINAL | DecayGF | 6.4 | 9.2 |
| MARGINAL | WallBounce | 6.2 | 12.9 |
| MARGINAL | StopShot | 6.1 | 12.6 |
| BELOW | Tsetlin | 5.8 | 12.9 |
| BELOW | Displace | 5.3 | 12.3 |
| **FLOOR — KEEP** | HeadOn | 5.2 | 8.6 |
| DISABLED | TMSelect | — | — |

HeadOn is lowest but **must stay**: it is the floor fallback, and disabling the
floor measurably hurt (5.08% / 175 dmg).

## Top actions

1. **Stop trusting the virtual metric as a ranker.** It is anti-correlated with
   real hit rate and unstable across run sets. The selector survives on its
   floor/tie hedge, not on its ordering.
2. **Fix the offline==online acceptance race.** It is currently flaky
   (typically 11/12), so offline numbers are strong-but-not-exact.
3. **Get a second adversary.** Every per-gun verdict rests on one wave surfer;
   the KEEP/BELOW boundaries are matchup-specific and per-gun N is small
   (47–898 shots).
4. **Decide Tsetlin and Displace.** Both are below overall on small N; Tsetlin
   now learns (clauses 714→13.8 literals) but is not competitive — tune the
   regression head or drop.
5. **Do not re-enable TMSelect** until the gate-margin/label problem is fixed;
   it cost 7.47% → 5.59% despite showing real energy structure in its clauses.
6. **Real-hit-rate-driven selection is not viable yet** — unselected guns get
   near-zero shots, so it needs forced exploration + shrinkage + thousands of
   shots per gun.