WaveSurfing/ReverseForwardSensors

/PrecisePrediction is nice. But it could be hard to fit in a minibot and also can be pretty nasty to implement without bugs. A much easier technique is to only (roughly) predict your future position one or two ticks away. Calculate where you'll be if you'd reverse and where you'd be if you "stepped on it". I call these positions reverse and forward sensors respectively.

To make this work you need to have enough bins in your stats array to make the reverse and forward sensors measure different bins. But you also need to do major BinSmoothing in order to avoid optimizing for local minimums and therefore get stuck in non-optimal positions.

Bots using:

• Pugilist 1.4 -> 1.4.4

Comments / questions

so is this a way of doing true surfing? i guess i am doing this right now in R2d2, but i don't have any bin smoothing at all. maybe that is contributing to my badness. before i read this , i assumed it was kind of an optional thing, but you say it is neccessary. so i'll look into bin smoothing for my bot soon. --andrew

You don't need to have enough tons of bins to make sure that the bins aren't the same, just do what YALT 1.3 does:

if(forwardBin != reverseBin){

   //pick new destination

} else {

   //continue using the last destination we picked.

}

--David Alves

I doubt this is the way to do surfing at all. Not that I'm sure of it, but I think looking ahead farther and predicting where you could go is better. -- PEZ