I suspect that if synergies and play-style variations (how you actually use the options) are significant, you won’t get much improvement by this mechanism. Without some analyitic or large-simulation scoring of combinations BEFORE you randomize variations of promising starting intuitions, you’re trying to test too big a space of possibilities in too few trials.
Also, if synergies are the key thing, it’s not clear that any improvement is “a step in the right direction” which can be further improved, or just “a lucky combo”, which stands alone.
The evolution is meant to quickly reduce the space of search. If every perk in the pool starts with just 1 ticket, then most of perks will only be tested once (because they lead to a loss and their population immediately got to zero). If the very first run is a loss, then the true-unknown winrate of a perk is likely not a 90%, so we should not regret throwing it away.
The synergies will have effect on the populations sizes later. Those pairs that synergise are slightly more likely to lead to a win and to increase tickets of both in the pool. After some weak perks fell off and the total amount of species in the pool was reduced, we expect potential synergy-makers to “meet” more often. That is a step in the right direction. If their win was just a lucky coincidence when the perks are not consistently good, they will die out a bit later.
Of course, if the very best build relies purely on synergy and is a combination of very-bad-in-solo perks, it will not be found.
I acknowledge there is no way to find the true best combination, that search would require bruteforce playing all possible combinations 20+ times. The aim is to find a managable algorithm which does not rely on personal evaluation at all (because opinions is partially the reason of “stagnation of meta”).
I suspect that if synergies and play-style variations (how you actually use the options) are significant, you won’t get much improvement by this mechanism. Without some analyitic or large-simulation scoring of combinations BEFORE you randomize variations of promising starting intuitions, you’re trying to test too big a space of possibilities in too few trials.
Also, if synergies are the key thing, it’s not clear that any improvement is “a step in the right direction” which can be further improved, or just “a lucky combo”, which stands alone.
The evolution is meant to quickly reduce the space of search. If every perk in the pool starts with just 1 ticket, then most of perks will only be tested once (because they lead to a loss and their population immediately got to zero). If the very first run is a loss, then the true-unknown winrate of a perk is likely not a 90%, so we should not regret throwing it away.
The synergies will have effect on the populations sizes later. Those pairs that synergise are slightly more likely to lead to a win and to increase tickets of both in the pool. After some weak perks fell off and the total amount of species in the pool was reduced, we expect potential synergy-makers to “meet” more often. That is a step in the right direction. If their win was just a lucky coincidence when the perks are not consistently good, they will die out a bit later.
Of course, if the very best build relies purely on synergy and is a combination of very-bad-in-solo perks, it will not be found. I acknowledge there is no way to find the true best combination, that search would require bruteforce playing all possible combinations 20+ times. The aim is to find a managable algorithm which does not rely on personal evaluation at all (because opinions is partially the reason of “stagnation of meta”).