Description of approach/results about pokemonshowdown-ai HOT 1 OPEN

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

I can definitely revamp the READMEs to better explain the project. Nowadays I've mostly been doing various training runs and tweaking the model, such that recently, on a good run, it could beat my max-damage heuristic agent in a bit under half of its matches but still usually fail against me or any moderately-competent human player. Soon I definitely want to try more ideas to expand and improve the model and algorithm more to see if I can get a better model, especially one that I'd be confident in trying to test on the ladder later down the line (which I haven't done at all yet).

As for the initial choices and setting, I chose Gen 4 which was more simple and familiar to me so coding an event parser and state vector representation for it could be somewhat easy, though there were still some issues with trying to figure out how to represent e.g. Ditto's state and all its corner cases. As this is mostly a hobby project I don't foresee supporting other generations, at least for a while until I can reliably produce a good Gen 4 Random Battles model as a proof of concept. Randomly-generated teams were because a fixed one felt too limited and possible to overfit without good signal, so I just picked Showdown's random battles format to sidestep the issue of having to pick a sufficiently-balanced team, though with the amount of variance already in the game I haven't confirmed whether this was the best choice, at least when starting out, since now it has to generalize and adapt to every playstyle based on its starting team and matchups.

This should probably go into the README now that I think about it so will do that and the rest of your points.

Lemme know if there's anything else you wanted to know about.

from pokemonshowdown-ai.