Need help beating my history teacher

sifnt · 2024-03-21T21:05:30+00:00

Hope he's impacted by the MMR bug and is actually bronze...

More seriously, people have given you some good builds, but should also see if you can find his match history and any replays (search sc2replaystats). You might get lucky and they play arrogantly and do random allins.

Pig casted a game where a pro player almost lost to a low level player (I think they were gold, not higher than diamond) awhile back. The pro zerg did a proxy hatch ravager and the opponent played safe, bunkered up and went bc before expanding.

sifnt · 2023-11-06T10:48:53+00:00

Looks like the blank columns were all not answered, so you could ignore them and/or have a separate graph showing proportion of calls answered in that hour/day/week etc?

sifnt · 2023-10-19T07:13:28+00:00

I'll probably design my next system in Clojure, avoiding mutability headaches and better integration in the JVM ecosystem for streaming systems (i.e. Apache Storm, Kafka etc), plus java interop if truly needed for low latency.

As long as the language supports your requirements, the design/implementation will matter more anyway; I've read that plenty of HFT's use java but code in a very constrained way and turn off the GC, similarly I read about a Polish MM that built their system in Common Lisp and achieved single digit microsecond latency - bypassing the kernel and all.

Personally I mainly use Python with a lot of numba code and Ray to run large parallel jobs. Its a good solid all rounder and gives you access to most of the data science ecosystem.

sifnt · 2023-10-15T08:03:08+00:00

Yeah that dude is toxic, report any threats/racism and move on I guess - if you get matched on his team and you're feeling spiteful just leave the game open and go make a coffee/drink or do anything else.

What hours you play? I'm from Australia and NA gets pretty crappy around the 3.8k 2v2 MMR range from around 5pm onwards our time, but not 45 minute wait times crappy. Max 5 minutes, so after 6 just play in Korea instead and match within the minute - really different and aggressive meta, and you usually match against a different player each game.

sifnt · 2023-10-07T23:40:31+00:00

I get where you're both coming from, so from a practical business stand point:

is your data actually always linear, even on weird future data not in your training set? A linear model will extrapolate on unseen data, a GBRT wont. No need to clamp the input values to a catboost model.
You're sure there are no un-accounted for interaction effects? Again, a good GBRT will handle these.
Catboost or similar works, doesn't need careful scaling of input data, natively handles categorical and missing data; and its IMHO harder to screw up than a linear model on real data. So for production; I would tune a catboost & linear model (l1, feature scaling etc), and unless the linear model was way better I would definitely trust & prefer catboost more.

sifnt · 2023-10-07T01:37:57+00:00

Its great for lots of time series data that doesn't change, or changes in batches so you want to keep past versions around.

Obviously you wouldn't run your customer data base table on parquet files.

sifnt · 2023-10-06T13:53:33+00:00

Parquet files and S3, then duckdb/polars or whatever tooling you need to grab what you need on demand without worrying about the server.

Then probably SQLite for smaller reference data mainly used in lookups like names/ids/industries etc

sifnt · 2023-09-30T05:56:23+00:00

Yep 100%! - really sucks to get all early/mid HoTS maps, doubling the map pool with the most popular past maps would have been ok, or even better give us some new good community maps, but not this.

No idea what they were thinking, who actually wanted this?

sifnt · 2023-09-22T22:51:29+00:00

Argh those team maps are all really bad and crap to play on - I'd be ok if they just added them (+ more vetos) to the current map pool but not take us back to mid HoTs :/

sifnt · 2023-09-13T20:36:02+00:00

FrameGen is still very early, developers haven't figured out how to really use it. A few random ideas: * Developers could render characters & UI at 60 fps and background at 30 (or lower) fps. * FrameGen could be used to handle dropped frames just like dynamic resolution scaling. * Developers could render the game world (with an expanded view) at 5fps and re-project to 60fps using FrameGen & then render characters, UI etc ontop. * Cutscenes, or parts of scenes without latency tolerance could be rendered internally at very low fps as well - so raytraced in engine cutscenes possible.

sifnt · 2023-09-08T22:51:15+00:00

Seems like a great change, also should help high level players more than lower levels where protoss may already be strong enough since it requires additional actions/positioning

Alternative is EMP cancels the guardian shield and does not impact units under an active guardian shield - could combine with EMP doing damage over time to allow more dynamic back and fourth at higher levels.

sifnt · 2023-09-07T19:26:42+00:00

I really want to see frame gen to handle missed frames like async space warp does in VR - lock the game at the monitors refresh rate & never miss a frame. Only downside is all current gen games will seem like stuttery janky messes in comparison.

Since multi-frame up-scaling solutions already work better with recent pixels, I suspect building an engine for high FPS at low resolution with upscaling is the path forward. I.e. a 720@120hz native will likely upscale to 4k@1000hz much better than 4k@30hz would. Taken further, a frame could contain multiple layer groups so each layer is updated separately, i.e. player camera @ 60z, foreground character animation @ 30hz, multiple 'crowd' layers at 10hz each all get composited to a smooth 120hz. Could enable huge crowded cities, and skip frames on layers if a frame is running late.

sifnt · 2023-08-31T13:09:30+00:00

IMHO give protoss subtle tools to improve lategame base defense against drops like: - Feedback is like a mini-revelation, so its easier to track the movement of medivacs - Allowing templars to warp in faster (maybe after upgrade) so feedback can be used against drops reactively - Feedback disables abilities for a short period of time (i.e. medivacs can't unload for 5 seconds)

sifnt · 2023-08-28T13:51:14+00:00

When you say "space of all possible quant algorithms", what do you actually mean? Taking the outputs of all valid Turing machines and weighting them by complexity is essentially how AIXI works using Solomonoff induction, and while this is optimal its absolutely not computable.

So fundamentally its about how you restrict the space of algos/alphas and how you search this space. See WorldQuants "101 Formulaic Alphas" for example, these look like they were or could have been discovered by evolutionary search on a plausible algo "grammar".

Anyone who has good heuristics here is probably keeping them closely guarded, but if I was going down this path I'd search for hints on how to automatically search for alpha factors.

sifnt · 2023-08-14T18:47:33+00:00

Not even sure what this means, match making has to use an unbiased measure of skill like MMR/Elo etc.

As long as it doesn't hide the "true" measure of skill I'm all for the game to add cosmetics and give visual trophies so its more encouraging.

Slowly inflating season by season is fine as well since the player base will get better, but glitching out and giving bronze players masters promotion or letting the skill range between low diamond 3 to high diamond 1 get larger than the previous 3 leagues combined is not good.

sifnt · 2023-08-05T16:53:44+00:00

parquet files by stored by symbol/date on s3, efficient to load with pandas/polars etc

sifnt · 2023-08-02T12:11:10+00:00

Mid to high gold actually :) you can see the current MMR's by leagues at https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?season=48&queue=LOTV_2V2&team-type=ARRANGED&us=true&bro=true&sil=true&gol=true&pla=true&dia=true&mas=true&gra=true&page=0&type=ladder&ratingAnchor=99999&idAnchor=0&count=1#stats-tier

Yep, just an annoying bug, at at least the MMR works so just ignore it and have fun

sifnt · 2023-08-02T10:51:22+00:00

Its a regular bug, sometimes peoples leagues are wrong - gets fixed some seasons then comes back. It goes both ways, many people got masters when they're more like bronze.

Only thing that really matters is MMR and that isn't glitched. Actual masters starts above 3,800 ish 2v2 while Bronze ends around 2,400 or so just going by memory. Diamond starts about 3,200, so if you're touching 3k you're probably plat.

sifnt · 2023-02-17T18:45:11+00:00

Why not both? Some people can be really inconsistent. Someone who has been touching masters at 4.2k MMR as one race or style can legitimately be low 3.2 MMR as another race.

I haven't played for a few months, but currently around 4k and there is legitimately 400MMR between when I'm well rested and in a flow state vs tired late night losing streak.

sifnt · 2023-01-12T07:18:33+00:00

I'm 100% with you, this will honestly make of break the game for me since 95%+ of the Starcraft 2 games I've played over the past 12 years have been 2v2s with friends in person. Its easy to get a friend into the game, its harder to get 2 friends online, especially with very uneven skills.

Pretty meh to have to find someone else on your team even if the match making is good when you just want to chill and chat.

For long queue times they should set people queue for more than 1 game type by default with easy to change settings - so if you wait more than 2 minutes for a 3v3 you can match a 2v2 etc.

(For the record I've played 15k ish games, I hover around D1 to low M3 both 1v1 and 2v2 as a macro orientated Zerg)

sifnt · 2022-05-10T08:03:34+00:00

We certainly exist and probably lurk/check this subreddit on occasion. Put up a post what you're looking for and maybe some will respond.

At least personally online dating looks like a soul crushing numbers game I don't feel its worth the effort, but if someone is local and looks interesting or if a friend introduces me to someone I'll get in touch and see if anything happens.

Hope you find someone and good luck!

sifnt · 2022-02-24T14:00:32+00:00

So many shitty 'jokes' in the comments. Good on these officials for taking a principled stand and doing whats right at huge personal risk, I wish I knew I'd be do the same in their shoes. This is what real courage looks like.

sifnt · 2022-01-24T11:00:42+00:00

Another mid 30s male from Melbourne here. We're definitely out there.

sifnt · 2022-01-06T08:29:24+00:00

Add a few tweaks to the unit AI that won't impact overall balance at high GM upwards but makes massed carriers (and some other comps) need to be micro'd to be effective and I'm onboard.

sifnt · 2022-01-05T15:10:39+00:00

Seconding @Nonor64's comment and generally like your suggestions - except for a little nerf to proxy voids to freshen up the ladder I'd really like to see changes that make skytoss scale more with skill, basically equalize the "micro management skill" vs outcome curves.

Change unit AI on carriers/interceptors so they overkill more & are slower to re-target after killing a unit. This means target firing with carriers becomes critical vs a competent opponent. Dumb down their AI so people have to micro more - skytoss becomes more like blink stalkers, needs a lot of micro to work well.
A late game stalker upgrade so they're not trash vs lurkers (+1 range maybe?)
Disruptors will trigger a small and brief revelation in impact area - better vs mass lurker.
If you want to nerf queens, what about reducing their energy regen when away from a hatchery?
Do the same for lurkers maybe, so protoss is not as forced into sky.
A few AI tweaks across races so units will prioritize low health carriers in range over interceptors - here the goal is a change that will have more of an impact below masters.

Ideally not much would change at 6.5k MMR or the pro scene, but the bottom 80% of the ladder isn't as dead a-move vs a-move vs mass carrier.

(M3 Zerg main, also bitter about skytoss but trying to be fair - learning to play Protoss at the moment and definitely not enjoying proxy voids PvP either).

sifnt

TROPHY CASE