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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Lemmy
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. |
Hi Lemmy,
There is a way to do basically what you're looking for, in a practial sense. But it requires human intervention. Essentially players can provide input into the expert system. All that is required is that the game producer provide time after a large player base is available so that the programmer can update the expert system based on players' experiences and ideas. Of course the expert system needs to be flexible enough to represent the player strategies accurately in terms of their realms of applicability. That is a very tall order already!
Its nowhere near as sexy in an AI sense as what you want to do, but it will work with current technology for a game with the depth of civ 
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Leland
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I don't think that computing power is that relevant in TBS genre... serious strategy gamers would gladly wait for 10-20 minutes per turn if they got more intelligent AI in exchange. The fact that games generally don't have an option of setting AI "depth" in this manner seems to imply that currently AIs are based on clever heuristics rather than brute force.
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panag
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MY WORDS ARE BACKED WITH BIO-CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Oct 2000
time: 07:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi panag, I don't get what you mean. Civ isn't real-time and I hope it never is! But as I said above, thinking in the background while the player moves is vital for good AI. |
hi ,
well there are seveal games around who have something that comes a bit close , but even they are far from being state of the art , .....
remember C&C , tiberian sun , firestorm, ....
something like that , but in real time , where there is a constant AI who runs , .....
sincve some people shall not like this , this could be solved with a basic "on / off" , ....
have a nice day
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MrBaggins
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quote:
Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Hi panag, I don't get what you mean. Civ isn't real-time and I hope it never is! But as I said above, thinking in the background while the player moves is vital for good AI. |
Intelligent human players will then play 'speedciv' to keep the AI from utilizing down time to think.
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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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quote:
Originally posted by Mark_Everson
4. At this point, if it's required that we stop, we just pick from the best indicated strategies. If there is extra time, there is a large variety of things that can be done. The one that I think is most attractive, is to encode the strategies as as individuals in a population of a genetic algorithm approach. We then pursue more simulations as in 3, but while tweaking the strategies through mutation and crossover. If the rule-based approach can give us any hints as to which are the most productive things to change, the more the better. The chromosomes will not generally contain numbers at all, but contain strategic objects. "Take Berlin", "obtain alliance against the Greeks". A mutation in the strategy might be something like "it would be nice to get an alliance against the Greeks, but it isn't that essential", or "it's Imperative". I'm not sufficiently foolish to think that this approach will very frequently give an answer better than the rule-based approach. However, it has the potential to break the AI out of the rut of always doing "predictable" things. |
You certainly can play around with evolutionary algorithms, but there are certain problems with that. First of all, your AI needs to be completely flushed out. Then, you need to somehow induce mutations and put them through a set of evaluation criteria, neither of which is a simple task. Another thing is you need to run the evolutionary algorithms as a meta-game, i.e., you need to do it outside the game, you can't do it when a game is running.
My take on this is heuristics. Start with a decent expert system, but add the capacity to learn from human players. That way, the AI is never obsolete. It can learn from playing with humans, and the developers can keep training it even after the game is released, and release the new code and/or database to make the AI smarter. This way, the game can be challenging for a long time.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:25
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Hi UR:
quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger
You certainly can play around with evolutionary algorithms, but there are certain problems with that. First of all, your AI needs to be completely flushed out. |
I don't know what you mean by this. Care to elaborate?
quote:
Then, you need to somehow induce mutations and put them through a set of evaluation criteria, neither of which is a simple task. |
My ideas on this are crudely described in the AI documentation. There will clearly be some art involved in this, but I don't think it'll be especially difficult.
quote:
Another thing is you need to run the evolutionary algorithms as a meta-game, i.e., you need to do it outside the game, you can't do it when a game is running. |
What is this statement based on? AFAIK it is utterly incorrect  . We are going to run the AI for Clash in-game in one or more separate threads.
The GalCiv approach, which appears to be quite good is, as Lemmy says, like what you appear to be describing. I expect it'll work quite well, but takes more dedication than the usual game software company is willing to expend. I'm looking forward to GalCiv rather a lot  .
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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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quote:
Originally posted by Mark_Everson
I don't know what you mean by this. Care to elaborate? |
That means the AI has to cover all the possibilities. If something is not in the code/database, it doesn't know how to handle it, and goes haywire in all likelihood. But knowing what to expect in the game is directly related to experience, which isn't something a programmer will have when writing the AI routines. You can tell this by all the expert systems in all the 4X games, they are okay, but ultimately they all rely on cheating - breaking the rules.
quote:
Originally posted by Mark_Everson
What is this statement based on? AFAIK it is utterly incorrect . We are going to run the AI for Clash in-game in one or more separate threads. |
Based on the genetic algorithms I have seen Not a whole lot, mind you, but the point is to have the individuals and an environment. If the individuals are the AI routines, the environment will be an arena with a set of criteria where these routines compete.
I am not 100% sure you cannot run the arena in situ, but you will need to spawn hundreds if not thousands of individuals for thousands of generations. This will be much better handled by a meta-game, i.e., run the arena outside the game itself to do the evolution.
A drawback of any evolutionary algorithm is that a solution is "better" only in comparison to other, presently known solutions; such an algorithm actually has no concept of an "optimal solution," or any way to test whether a solution is optimal. This is not entire true of Civ.
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Mark_Everson
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Canton, MI
Jan 1970
time: 00:25
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Hi Urban Ranger, thanks for the detailed response.
quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger
That means the AI has to cover all the possibilities. If something is not in the code/database, it doesn't know how to handle it, and goes haywire in all likelihood. But knowing what to expect in the game is directly related to experience, which isn't something a programmer will have when writing the AI routines. You can tell this by all the expert systems in all the 4X games, they are okay, but ultimately they all rely on cheating - breaking the rules. |
What you say is a problem with an AI constructed by very simple heuristics of the if/then type. I agree that that is a standard for AI now, but that is one of the things I think needs to be discarded to get the next step in AI for civ games. We will certainly have a set of heuristics to suggest good starting strategies, but where we differ from the standard approach is that we then passed several strategies to see which fits better in a given situation. What the Clash AI does is it has a cartoon of the world for each type of strategy any uses the cartoon version, which is based on game parameters, to estimate success of a strategy. Each type of strategy, FE "attack area" to try to take control a given area of the map, has its own cartoon of the world that outlines the big issues involved. It's kind of the way people think about it. This is gone over in great detail in our "AI Plan" document in "AI -- the thread" on the Clash forum. There is a link to that thread in the third post of this thread.
quote:
Based on the genetic algorithms I have seen Not a whole lot, mind you, but the point is to have the individuals and an environment. If the individuals are the AI routines, the environment will be an arena with a set of criteria where these routines compete.
I am not 100% sure you cannot run the arena in situ, but you will need to spawn hundreds if not thousands of individuals for thousands of generations. This will be much better handled by a meta-game, i.e., run the arena outside the game itself to do the evolution. |
Well, it's back to the books for you! That is in fact a typical way GAs are run for engineering optimizations and other things warrior doing your very best to find the absolute global optimal. This is a GAME and I certainly don't attempt to optimize all my strategies in it, why the heck should the AI? The job of GAs in Clash is to just take stabs in the dark looking for "surprise" approaches, that are different from Clash-standard AI, to make the AI less predictable.
quote:
A drawback of any evolutionary algorithm is that a solution is "better" only in comparison to other, presently known solutions; such an algorithm actually has no concept of an "optimal solution," or any way to test whether a solution is optimal. This is not entire true of Civ. |
When you can play an optimal game of civ I will worry about it. We are only looking for an entertaining and sometimes surprising AI.
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LDiCesare
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La Ferté sous Jouarre France
Jan 2001
time: 05:25
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Soren's AI work is a very clear indication of what he did in Civ3: He says the game must have a small anough search space that the computer can search it efficiently, which means dumbing down game mechanisms so that whatever the ai doesn't know how to exploit effectively should be removed. Someone wrote an article on Civ3 showing that was exactly what happened.
On a different game, MOO3 seems to have gotten out with a pitiful enemy AI (the viceroys seem to be good but not always doing what you expect them to do). The interesting bit of info is that the MOO3 team changed AI settings 2 weeks prior to release because it was too hard, and ended up with a too easy AI. Since that looks like algorithmic rather than text files tweaking, it is quite sad. On another side, GalCiv is supposed to have an efficient AI which can be tweaked by changing just one figure, which decides whether or not it will recognize threats and decide of certain advanced tactics. I'd really like to see this one come out in France soon...
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23-01-2003 20:17
, Soren has not reached his limits yet , .......
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