steveuk
Posts: 66
Joined: 5/15/2005
From: Essex, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ericbabe
The AI is never going to be able perfectly to simulate the minds of commanders on the field of a Civil War battlefield -- there will always be little things wrong with the AI. I'm happy to work at identifying and correcting some instances of poor behavior, however, as I've mentioned, I have found in the past that often in doing this, the "fixes" that rule-out poor behavior end up crippling the AI in other ways and frequently create just as many problems as they solve... though not always! sometimes fixes do work, but it's a lot of effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
Every six months or so I write a little post on the theoretical limitations of AI; I won't go through the whole thing now, but will summarize. The way that AI works is by searching through something called a "state space" for the game, to look for optimal changes to the game's current state. The larger the size of the game's state space, the longer it takes the AI to find maxima within it. For most games that people enjoy playing, the state spaces are so enormous that AI's never actually search the entire state space, even for a single turn. A game like tic-tac-toe (or, uhm, noughts-and-crosses) does have a solubly small state space; a game such as Chess does not. I've calculated the rough size of FOF's state space, and to search through all the permutations of the state space for a single turn at PC processor speeds would take longer than trillions of times the age of the Universe. So most games using AI have to use approximation techniques to search subsets of the state space -- they have to identify vast parts of the state space to exclude from their search in order to whittle down the size of the space to something that is a searchable size. For a game like FOF, this means excluding more than 99.99999999999999% of the possible moves from the AI's consideration.
Programmers working with AI spend a lot of time refining the approximation to the search of the game's state space, and there are many documented techniques for doing this. Even for relatively simple games, however, these techniques have not been very successful. I've studied the AI for the game Go quite a bit in the course of trying to teach myself how to program AI. Go has a state space that is considerably larger than Chess, but much, much smaller than a game like FOF's. There have been PhD computer scientists who have dedicated their careers -- one guy I read has been working on this for 30 years -- to developing good Go AI algorithms, and there's a whole community of computer scientists who are working on solving the problem of Go's AI. Given all the enormous human effort poured into writing a good Go algorithm, it's disappointing to learn that the best Go algorithm that's been developed to date only has the Go ranking of "weak amateur" when playing against human opponents, and even that algorithm requires more computing power than a standard PC has and takes a long time between turns to make its moves. Given that FOF's state space is exponentially larger than Go's, and also considering that I'm not about to devote my entire career to developing a FOF AI algorithm, and also considering that there is not a community of PhD computer scientists working on this problem, to expect the AI to play above amateur level or (much harder) to simulate what historical generals might do is, I humbly submit, an unreasonably high expectation.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the explanation outlaying the mechanics involved in trying to get an A.I. to be able to act reasonably well in this sort of simulation. I programmed a strategy game back in the early 80's called 'Red War' so believe me I am familiar with the techniques you describe which seems akin to a basic Array which is what I used way back then.
I know most modern A.I.'s in these sort of games is never going to be able to act or react in a correct manner as the computation power plus time involved is just not available and from a commercial aspect...not viable.
Only within the last few years have we been able to programme a chess game to compete on a comparable level with a grand master and that is on an 8X8 matrix! The permutations involed with FOF and any other Tactical/Strategic wargame would be endless in comparison and is the main reason why I like your COMMAND/CONTROL feature as it takes away some of the human players advantage.
However I do know that to stop the artillery unit from doing what it did in my situation is a fairly simple process in comparison.
If artillery was prohibited from entering enemy ZOC (or within a one hex range) whether under A.I. or human control it would stop any repeat of a suicidal attack being carried out. Of course your own or A.I. non-artillery units could still enter the ZOC of an artillery unit although just to be a right pain in the arse....Could units attempting to enter the ZOC of an artillery unit have to pass a morale check or have the right attribute (like hero/wild) before doing so?
I appreciate the time you and the others are giving in responding to my issues 
_____________________________
It is well that war is so terrible; else we would grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee (1807-1870)
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