For starters I apologize if this is in the wrong thread. I'm not quite sure where to post such a meta topic at.
But whenever I create a team from scratch, the team usually deviates quite a bit from the original approach. Eventually, whenever I get to a point where I feel like I can no longer make any progression on bettering my team in any way, I look up some teams on the same playstyle. For example, I noticed this back in XY when I had an offensive sand team using Excadrill. Eventually the metagame and the team kind of "forced" me to build a team that I considered to be the most "optimal" for such a team. I looked up other teams based around the same idea and sure enough they all looked nearly identical to mine. Then during gen 8 I decided to create a stall team. I had tinkered with it for a while and eventually I ended up with a team that looked identical to every other gen 8 "stall" team. And while some moves/EVs/items here and there were a bit different, overall 95% of the team was identical. This phenomenon reminds me of VGC, probably moreso there, since it's extremely noticeable there. A lot of VGC teams consist of nearly the same pokemon, some were even the same team.
It reminds me a lot of neural networks and how they work. Basically neural networks run thousands/millions of simulations (or in Pokemon Showdown's case, the neural network is just every single user, and the simulations are just every single battle) until eventually an optimal outcome is reached to where no more progress can be made. It really makes me think about the simularities between neural networks and pokemon showdown and whenever I notice how similar my teams to other teams using the same strategy, it makes me really think that there definitely is somewhere out there, a statistically "optimal" team for that archetype and all the battles we have done are just the equivalent to the simulations a neural network would have run.
But whenever I create a team from scratch, the team usually deviates quite a bit from the original approach. Eventually, whenever I get to a point where I feel like I can no longer make any progression on bettering my team in any way, I look up some teams on the same playstyle. For example, I noticed this back in XY when I had an offensive sand team using Excadrill. Eventually the metagame and the team kind of "forced" me to build a team that I considered to be the most "optimal" for such a team. I looked up other teams based around the same idea and sure enough they all looked nearly identical to mine. Then during gen 8 I decided to create a stall team. I had tinkered with it for a while and eventually I ended up with a team that looked identical to every other gen 8 "stall" team. And while some moves/EVs/items here and there were a bit different, overall 95% of the team was identical. This phenomenon reminds me of VGC, probably moreso there, since it's extremely noticeable there. A lot of VGC teams consist of nearly the same pokemon, some were even the same team.
It reminds me a lot of neural networks and how they work. Basically neural networks run thousands/millions of simulations (or in Pokemon Showdown's case, the neural network is just every single user, and the simulations are just every single battle) until eventually an optimal outcome is reached to where no more progress can be made. It really makes me think about the simularities between neural networks and pokemon showdown and whenever I notice how similar my teams to other teams using the same strategy, it makes me really think that there definitely is somewhere out there, a statistically "optimal" team for that archetype and all the battles we have done are just the equivalent to the simulations a neural network would have run.