Will you be dumb enough to buy Beyond The Sword?

[ZEE]

enjoying your circle-jerk people? your little ego smashing...?

the Civ "topic" is just an excuse for the weekly EoN flame-a-thon. It keeps yall occupied with something to do for a while. (sigh)

Threads with so called "drama" or "flaming" in them, if Moderated properly and held in check, bring in lots of views by lurkers, raise 'Poly's post count as a whole, and as i mentioned before keeps yall occupied.

Why the hell do you think I am still allowed to do my thing from time to time. this is a very basic, simple equation that i HOPE most of you already know.

Meh

pieceâ„¢

[Wiglaf]

Originally posted by EyesOfNight
Checkers is far more complex and difficult than civilization could ever be. Civilization, in its present form, is a game made for 5 year olds. If you find Civ4 difficult you more than likely find making breakfast in the morning difficult as well.

I do not know what world you live in , but I want to live in it.

[Wiglaf]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Go, unlike checkers (and even chess), is a very worthy game - no one has reduced it to some trivial AI yet

No one has reduced chess to some trivial AI, either.

[Wiglaf]

Well, maybe they have in some ways, but you get my point.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
No one has reduced chess to some trivial AI, either.

Yes they have. As I said, any freshman compsci student can write a decent chess AI.

[SlowwHand]

Why didn't they tweak a successful Civ II?
Why did they totally deviate from something people enjoyed? MP and SP wusses could play it.
Why jack with it?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Wiglaf
Well, maybe they have in some ways, but you get my point.

[Jaguar]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Go, unlike checkers (and even chess), is a very worthy game - no one has reduced it to some trivial AI yet

It's not going to be very long at all before AIs can consistently beat humans in Go. Computers improve every month.

I don't understand why you'd place so much importance on which games a computer can win at. That can change very quickly. Human abilities, though, remain pretty static. No human is ever going to come close to knowing all the possibilities for either Go or Chess. That makes both games worthy pursuits.

[Kuciwalker]

Computers getting faster all the time doesn't really help games so much, by the nature of the problem. Naively treated, the problem is horribly exponential - meaning even exponential increases in computer power only provide minor improvements in computer performance.

For a computer to be able to handle a game, you have to figure out effective ways to reduce the search space. In doing so, you've basically made a simple mathematical formulation of rules that humans use to do the same thing.

The games are worthy pursuits, but you can't compare them in complexity to something like civ, where it's essentially impossible (and will be for decades at least) to use anything but heuristics instead of search - and those heuristics will always be worse than a good human.

[Kuciwalker]

Go has certain properties that ensure it will remain intractable for a long time, barring significant advances in the mathematical study of the game itself.

High-level human play of Go relies on certain computations that the human brain is very good at and cannot feasibly be done by computers yet.

[Jaguar]

It has perfect information, but no luck and no diplomacy. Computers can do very well with that sort of game.

I don't know the game well enough to speak too much about its complexity, but it obviously has too many variations possible for a computer to use simple brute force. Teach it some shortcuts, though, and it can use sheer computational ability to overpower people. It hasn't happened yet, but it should happen at some point.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Jaguar
It has perfect information, but no luck and no diplomacy. Computers can do very well with that sort of game.

Not necessarily. It has a tremendous search space (vastly larger than chess or checkers), and one that doesn't contract as you get deeper in the game.

I don't know the game well enough to speak too much about its complexity, but it obviously has too many variations possible for a computer to use simple brute force. Teach it some shortcuts, though, and it can use sheer computational ability to overpower people. It hasn't happened yet, but it should happen at some point.

That was my point - we would need significant advances in the mathematical study of the game to reduce the search space to anything approaching reasonable. Those advances essentially represent "solving" the game - figuring out simple, mechanical rules for eliminating useless moves.

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Why didn't they tweak a successful Civ II?
Why did they totally deviate from something people enjoyed? MP and SP wusses could play it.
Why jack with it?

Because it's already been done.

[Kuciwalker]

And computers can actually do well in games with diplomacy*, and can handle luck okay too. Backgammon has some strong AI's, for instance.

* against other computers - that sounds like a copout, but really the problem of communicating with humans is harder than the problem of just conducting diplomacy.

[LDiCesare]

SP can be very frustrating Particularly when you have a nice river running up into a desert and then you discover it's not floodplains because it's the capital-river

That's moddable. I even told Sirian how to fix it.