Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: steveh11Matrix

Not quite as bad as that, surely. I like the idea of the licensed 'plug-in' module.

For me, PBEM is out of the question. FTF/Hotseat or (more likely) vs the ai, so an ai that I haven't 'solved' or that doeas something a little different each time is a good thing!

Steve.

Yammas from The Apo-Tiki Lounge. Future site of WITP AE benders! And then the s--t hit the fan

quote:

ORIGINAL: steveh11Matrix

Hi Ron! For me, playing against another guy is a social thing, so FTF is the only way to go. I have one player near(ish)by and we 'indulge' occasionally. For FTF play however I prefer good old low-tech miniatures or counters, though.

I've heard a lot of people saying "Play PBEM!", but what they don't understand is that I want to play on my schedule, and that I get as much fun playing with the game(s) as actually playing them. It's a classic case of "What floats your boat".

Steve.

Yammas from The Apo-Tiki Lounge. Future site of WITP AE benders! And then the s--t hit the fan

quote:

But it would be nice if you could get it to the point where if it "gets hurt" a couple
of times in an area, it would try to avoid that area while beating down whatever
unit(s) were causing it's pain. If a child can learn to avoid a hot stove, it would
seem that an AI could be programmed to avoid sailing TF after TF into harms way
without taking the slightest action to suppress or eliminate the source of the harm.
It does have access to ALL the information in the game.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag



I'm all for it, but I think we are still years away from the horsepower required.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Knavey

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag



I'm all for it, but I think we are still years away from the horsepower required.

But you know what...at one point we were still years away from being able to make a game like WitP...so I suppose that probably within the next ten years we might see something that comes closer to the expectations that players have for an AI enemy.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Thayne

For the AI problem, I do not think that any solution would work short of a PBEM server where players email their games to the AI computer (which then learns from multiple games with different players), who then resolves the turn and emails back the moves.

This, of course, is only going to be possible for the more popular games -- it will not be cost effective otherwise.

Such a system would not need so much heavy programming. The game designers themselves can see what is happening in different games and make adjustments -- not necessarily waiting for the AI to learn from its mistakes, but instead forcing adjustments on the computer. Which, then, will affect all of the games that server is playing.

I can see no other cost-effective way for that portion of the game industry to advance.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft

It seems to me the only practical answer to this is to allow users to script their own AIs. The main reason developers churn out cr*p is because it's not worth them expendng the time and effort. On the other hand, it may be worth it to the users.

You're still not going to match a human player like this but I do believe there is scope for a lot of improvement.

The Lua embeddable scripting language might be a good technical solution as to how to provide the functionality ...

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl

But it would be nice if you could get it to the point where if it "gets hurt" a couple
of times in an area, it would try to avoid that area while beating down whatever
unit(s) were causing it's pain. If a child can learn to avoid a hot stove, it would
seem that an AI could be programmed to avoid sailing TF after TF into harms way
without taking the slightest action to suppress or eliminate the source of the harm.
It does have access to ALL the information in the game.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Kitakami

Having actually had to program a learning AI for the simple game of Pente, I have an appreciation for what it takes to program a system that actually learns from its own (and the enemy's) mistakes.

The programming side of it is a large undertaking, and I do not think you could do a generic AI that covers every type of game... it would have to take too much into account. The problem with that is the fact that a specialized AI would, although technically a success, not be an economic success :(

And to the above you have to add the fact that the knowledge databases would grow, and grow, and grow... the more you play, the bigger they'd get (that's how you store knowledge for the system).

And if you want the system to be efficient, you'd have a server online, where all the registered copies of the game would dump what they have learned from the player(s) that use them, and distribute the knowledge to all the copies by means of AI updates. Otherwise a registered copy would only learn from the local players, and a player with a different style might throw it into a fit.

Doable? Yes. Worth the while of whoever does it? Don't know. But if it ever gets done, count on an industry award, because a good AI is almost a dream that can't be reached... yet.

quote:

This is the next silver bullet possibly. I think wargame developers, though, are going to eventually have to adobt structured disk assess data management where volatile data resides in a structured disk based system, like an RDBMS. Turn based strategy are not particularly high performance, high throughput designs, but they tend to cart around comparitively larges amounts of data. With something like that you can use

quote:

ORIGINAL: vorkosigan

quote:

This is the next silver bullet possibly. I think wargame developers, though, are going to eventually have to adobt structured disk assess data management where volatile data resides in a structured disk based system, like an RDBMS. Turn based strategy are not particularly high performance, high throughput designs, but they tend to cart around comparitively larges amounts of data. With something like that you can use

Take a look on HTTR. Just from observing the game behaviour, overall design and developers background (look at Panther Games website) I must admit that those aussie guys have achieved a real breakthrough on the 'Dumb AI front'.

HTTR AI plans. This is, the Computer player (at the tactical/operational level) chooses a set of goals, and lays down an strategy ('sequence of moves') that try to maximize success likelihood while minimizing risks/costs. This might sound like rocket science (it is, just ponder the planning ability of the Mars Rovers which were using these same algorithms). But the algorithms for making this work have been laying around for thirty years.

I think that an on-line learning AI system deployed on a commercial product is non-sense. It is easier/more economical to devise a system that learns but that is trained in the development/beta-testing phase. It is not meant to be a robot free to roam your house - but a robot designed to 'roam' in a virtual, synthetic world were physics and complexity/chaos is controlled by a human ( yeah, brilliant but still human). Suitable learning algorithms for this could be the ones known collectivelly as 'reinforcement learning'.

Still, there could no need at all to 'train' the system. Just take and interview a few chosen, well-respected grognards, profile them and use these 'user profiles' to build the backbone of the AI 'experience'.

But unfortunately, I don't think that applying this technology on the wargaming software industry. Mainly because profit-seeking projects have their own characteristic constraints: time and budget. Defence and space exploration also must battle with this, but the resources at their disposal are several orders of magnitude bigger than usual game development ones.

However, a mixed open source/free software enterprise could do this. First, there is the pioneering spirit ( two guys in a garage can be very dangerous ). And second, it can make profits. Just that one does not try to sell the 'software' (which is a funny idea after all if we look at it objectively), but one sells the artwork, the historic research, the scenarios or the trained computer players...

PS: Sorry for any misspelled word or funny English sentence. I broke my left arm last weekend an I am Spanish :S

quote:

ORIGINAL: vorkosigan

quote:

This is the next silver bullet possibly. I think wargame developers, though, are going to eventually have to adobt structured disk assess data management where volatile data resides in a structured disk based system, like an RDBMS. Turn based strategy are not particularly high performance, high throughput designs, but they tend to cart around comparitively larges amounts of data. With something like that you can use

Take a look on HTTR. Just from observing the game behaviour, overall design and developers background (look at Panther Games website) I must admit that those aussie guys have achieved a real breakthrough on the 'Dumb AI front'.

HTTR AI plans. This is, the Computer player (at the tactical/operational level) chooses a set of goals, and lays down an strategy ('sequence of moves') that try to maximize success likelihood while minimizing risks/costs. This might sound like rocket science (it is, just ponder the planning ability of the Mars Rovers which were using these same algorithms). But the algorithms for making this work have been laying around for thirty years.

I think that an on-line learning AI system deployed on a commercial product is non-sense. It is easier/more economical to devise a system that learns but that is trained in the development/beta-testing phase. It is not meant to be a robot free to roam your house - but a robot designed to 'roam' in a virtual, synthetic world were physics and complexity/chaos is controlled by a human ( yeah, brilliant but still human). Suitable learning algorithms for this could be the ones known collectivelly as 'reinforcement learning'.

Still, there could no need at all to 'train' the system. Just take and interview a few chosen, well-respected grognards, profile them and use these 'user profiles' to build the backbone of the AI 'experience'.

But unfortunately, I don't think that applying this technology on the wargaming software industry. Mainly because profit-seeking projects have their own characteristic constraints: time and budget. Defence and space exploration also must battle with this, but the resources at their disposal are several orders of magnitude bigger than usual game development ones.

However, a mixed open source/free software enterprise could do this. First, there is the pioneering spirit ( two guys in a garage can be very dangerous ). And second, it can make profits. Just that one does not try to sell the 'software' (which is a funny idea after all if we look at it objectively), but one sells the artwork, the historic research, the scenarios or the trained computer players...

PS: Sorry for any misspelled word or funny English sentence. I broke my left arm last weekend an I am Spanish :S

quote:

Yep, HTTR is great, but you will also note that Dave is quite clear in all his posts that there is a finite limit to how many units he can handle based on horsepower of machines. It's that old "I can do fantastic ai for 1 unit or great ai for 100 units or average ai for 1000 units or poor ai for 10000 units."

quote:

ORIGINAL: vorkosigan

quote:

Yep, HTTR is great, but you will also note that Dave is quite clear in all his posts that there is a finite limit to how many units he can handle based on horsepower of machines. It's that old "I can do fantastic ai for 1 unit or great ai for 100 units or average ai for 1000 units or poor ai for 10000 units."

Hmmm, I think we need to get creative when we talk about the term 'unit'. First, we should take apart the concept of counter ( the physical representation of things on the board i.e. what can move, kill an die) from that of organization.

Now I don't fully have time to ellaborate on this, but I promise to expose my (hopefully) points in next posts.

quote:

Hmmm, I think we need to get creative when we talk about the term 'unit'. First, we should take apart the concept of counter ( the physical representation of things on the board i.e. what can move, kill an die) from that of organization.

quote:

The AI architecture has not been set yet but it will doubtless be some sort of layered hierarchy of finite state machines within a subsumtive framework. (Don't worry if that is Greek to you - it means a fairly conventional job, thats all). Some of the problems posed towards the middle layer of the AI sound like they would lend themselves to a scripting solution so there might well be a 'playbook' aspect too.

Something that I have not done yet in my games but would be fun to do is to give the the fsm agents a 'memory' of what they have done so far. That would really help with 'maintenance of the objective' issues in the short run, and would open up all kinds of possibilities more generally. Once you have a memory you can start to do all kinds of other things, one of which is simple learning.

Will it be fancy? Nope, not to start but it might actually reduce the complexity of the AI in the long run rather than increase it. Instead of working out all the combinations and permutations for all possible action in code it might become possible to do a simple look up of all ~matching instances in a database of memories and estimate probable outcomes based on what it finds - that sort of thing. That makes me really, really interested in pursuing it!

quote:

It will never have a killer AI, but it should have a sufficiently competent one to teach a newcomer some of the basics and to provide useful filler players in a multiplayer game if desired. Beyond that I cannot really say yet.

AI is the most fun part of any game project and I'm sure that there will be continual development over many years to come in the MWIF AI. At least some of it will be exposed so that interested parties can tweak weightings, etc. For version 1, our goals will be quite modest - honestly, there is no other way to do it!

quote:

ORIGINAL: Grotius

If you'd like to read an interesting discussion of a new massive-wargame-AI project, the AI designer for Matrix's version of "War in Flames" has been posted some of his ideas for that game's AI. That guy, Robert Crandall, says AI is the most "fun" part of a computer wargame project, which is interesting. Here's more:

quote:

The AI architecture has not been set yet but it will doubtless be some sort of layered hierarchy of finite state machines within a subsumtive framework. (Don't worry if that is Greek to you - it means a fairly conventional job, thats all). Some of the problems posed towards the middle layer of the AI sound like they would lend themselves to a scripting solution so there might well be a 'playbook' aspect too.

Something that I have not done yet in my games but would be fun to do is to give the the fsm agents a 'memory' of what they have done so far. That would really help with 'maintenance of the objective' issues in the short run, and would open up all kinds of possibilities more generally. Once you have a memory you can start to do all kinds of other things, one of which is simple learning.

Will it be fancy? Nope, not to start but it might actually reduce the complexity of the AI in the long run rather than increase it. Instead of working out all the combinations and permutations for all possible action in code it might become possible to do a simple look up of all ~matching instances in a database of memories and estimate probable outcomes based on what it finds - that sort of thing. That makes me really, really interested in pursuing it!

And this:

quote:

It will never have a killer AI, but it should have a sufficiently competent one to teach a newcomer some of the basics and to provide useful filler players in a multiplayer game if desired. Beyond that I cannot really say yet.

AI is the most fun part of any game project and I'm sure that there will be continual development over many years to come in the MWIF AI. At least some of it will be exposed so that interested parties can tweak weightings, etc. For version 1, our goals will be quite modest - honestly, there is no other way to do it!

These posts are on the second page of the thread entitled "AI/No AI" in the WIF forum. See

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=640847

quote:

I would agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. The AI aspect of game development, for me, would be the central focus of anything I would choose to work on. I find that part of a game, from a development perspective, to be, by far, the most compelling aspect of a game project.