04-08-2001 08:08									#31
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quote: Originally posted by Lou Wigman If you think that you can tweek an AI like that in CTP2 you are having yourselves on. There are so many parameters that such a task would take a few thousand years. After adjusting a couple of things you would need to play test to see if this actually did what you wanted. Tweek again, play again etc. Since there are hundreds of parameters this is clearly an impossible task. A real AI that learns and adapts its play to its opponents is not even on the horizon. Sorry for being a wet blanket!

TRUST ME, there are people fanatical enough to do that, it wouldn't take thousands of years(at most a month of dedicated work, and then they allow us to d/l it, there arent hundreds of them, infact what you said made little sense, i can understand pessimism, but this is largely unbased.

	04-08-2001 08:27									#32
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Splangy

Even if there are not hundreds (I think there are - look again) the number of permutations possible is utterly staggering even more so when most of these parameters accept a large number of values. I have been playing these games from the year dot. Many things have changed. One thing thats remained constant throughout this time is crappy AI. If it was so easy that a couple of months of 'fiddling' could get it right it would have done long ago!.

	04-08-2001 09:14									#33
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Lou, check out the MedMof for CTP2, if you've got the game - WesW and Co have done a huge amount of work on the game and made it a wholy better experience - and it hasn't taken them thousands of years. They've also worked on the AI where they can - it isn't impossible.

	04-08-2001 10:34									#34
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quote: Originally posted by Zanzin Lou, check out the MedMof for CTP2, if you've got the game - WesW and Co have done a huge amount of work on the game and made it a wholy better experience - and it hasn't taken them thousands of years. They've also worked on the AI where they can - it isn't impossible.

this is what im trying to say lou, if you haven't messed with the AI ever than how would you know?

	04-08-2001 14:16									#35
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It obviously can be done Lou since it has already been done. I'm not sure why you can't understand that. Zanzin and Splangy are right on this one and you are wrong.

	04-08-2001 17:10									#36
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If Firaxis give us the tools, I don't see why the AI can't be made better. A lot of exploits and AI "stupidity" will be found by players after the release. These can then be fixed.

To make the AI any good on the other hand, might be a more daunting task. The field of AI is making good progress, but still has a long way to go. IMO, to implement an good AI in a game as complex as Civ will be especially hard.

Firaxis, give us a programmable neural net AI implementation. Then after we have trained and tweaked it a few million times, maybe the AI will begin to shape up

	04-08-2001 20:30									#37
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quote: Originally posted by Lou Wigman A real AI that learns and adapts its play to its opponents is not even on the horizon. Sorry for being a wet blanket!

To those of you who are saying that Lou's wrong about this...

I wrote an AI script for AOK that was much better than the one that came with the game. It took me over 7 months and the final script was over 20,000 lines long and yet it still fell far short of being an opponent that could "learn and adapt its play to its opponents". One reason it took so much work was that I was trying to make it unpredictable in an intelligent way (like a human player) and also adaptable to different situations. Nevertheless, it still fell far short of being even close in these respects to a good human player.

So while I won't even try to predict how long it will be before a truly great AI (=good human player) will be created, I can say that it's much harder than most of you seem to realize (which has been repeated in these forums for some time now by others in the know.)

When Civ III comes out, and assuming the tools are good enough, I'm sure you'll see people like myself making some pretty good improvements to the AI over time, but nothing groundbreaking.