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`.
SirStone
ca82053a11