Good AI is Critical for the Next Big Step in Civ Games

[alva]

Didn't read the whole post, but the people that don't don't visit these kinds of forums, will have a much harder (fun?) time with for example Civ3 then the rest of us. The AI is good, but the programmer is not playing against 1 person, he doing so against a couple of thousand all sharing their tactics.
Not to mention that the AI has to be flexible enough to work for all maps and has no idea what to expect, we do.
We decide which victory options don't fit our playing style and can turn them off if want to.
We don't like the start, hmm, ok, let's restart.
etc...

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
In principle this can be done, but it would take Forever to converge to a good experiential base for the AI that way using a GA or some similar approach IMO. The problem is designing a suitable objective function. In games where there's only a few decisions and a resolution is quickly reached, you can ascribe an advantage in principle to each move. Or at least you can know that a bundle of say three moves resulted in a win 63% of the time or some such. You can then use this to build crude reasoning based on experience for the AI. The decision space is so vast and nonlinear in a civ-type game that it would IMO take a database of probably tens of thousands of games at a minimum to evolve a decent experience base. YMMV.

Eloquently put..........and exactly what I meant about computers playing chess. The deterministic nature of the game makes for more implementable objective functions. The decision space, whilst vast, is more suitable for computer analysis.

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by jdd2007
i wish AI wouldnt be so predictable. even if they use the 'best' strategies, its worthless if you know exactly what theyre going to do.

Making an " unpredictable" AI (e.a that continually will come up with smart strategic/tactical surprises) is a lot harder than making a predictable good one.

[Lemmy]

I just flat out disagree. The parameter space is far too vast to do the AI this way practically. Given the sizes of the decision spaces for such games it would be forever lurching one way or another due to brave extrapolations based on recent experience. You could do this sort of thing for a few parameters that affect what the AI does, but that's a pale shadow of what you'd like. And it would indeed be very cool if it worked. Maybe in 2025 it'll be practical.

If it's done intelligently i think it's possible, the decision space can be confined by using parameter ranges instead of using exact parameter values.
It's true that it will need a lot of games before it is a good AI, but the AI can be trained while beta testing. And first tries with certain parameters don't even have to be bad if there still is a basic Civ AI present.

[Solver]

Lemmy, too many possbilities. The people who program AI just can't imagine every single thing that can happen within a civ game.

[DrSpike]

He was, I think, referring to previous posts about making AI adaptive.

[Lemmy]

He was, I think, referring to previous posts about making AI adaptive.

Yes, i was. An adaptive AI would be a solutionto the problem that there are too many possibilities for the programmer to see.

[Solver]

Adaptive AI isn't possible to build on our current tech basis, still!

[DrSpike]

Maybe, maybe not......see Mark's post. I'm not trying to be rude but have you actually read any of the posts in this thread besides your own?

[Solver]

Yup . Actually I never read my own posts... still such an AI is not possible .

[Lemmy]

Originally posted by Solver
Yup . Actually I never read my own posts... still such an AI is not possible .

What problems do you see with it then?

[Lemmy]

Actually, if it is imposisble, i'd argue that it isn't becuase of our tech, but because of the programmers ability and time.

Adaptive AI wouldn't require much processor power, it's basically looking things up, and saving new things. It would require more space, but the space needed can be brought down by an efficient design, for example by not saving all cases, but only the most "important" ones, and keep averages for the remaining cases.

[LDiCesare]

Lemmy, learning AIs are possible, but what do they learn? In a Case-based reasoning example, you need to code a comparison function to compare two cases, and may also need adaptation to adapt the previous solution to the current one.
The comparison function would be pretty awful to code in a civ-like game. Additionnally, new situations would arise which would be hard to manage, and CBR produces predictable responses.
Now adapting AI is possible within limits if the game has a set of "rules" which can all be adapted (mutated...).

[Lemmy]

The comparison function would be pretty awful to code in a civ-like game. Additionnally, new situations would arise which would be hard to manage, and CBR produces predictable responses.

Yeah, i realized that in my latest post, about the programmers ability.
Though it would be nice to expirement with it, in a dumbed down version of civ.....Civ3 maybe
Very nice actually now that i think about it, since i never programmed an AI before.
I'll add it to my list of projects to do...which is growing quite long now

[Solver]

What problems do you see with it then?

Not enough knowledge to mimic any real 'learning' patterns.