RE: AI (was error handling)

["Stanley Sutton" <sutton at earthdecision dot com>]

I haven't looked at the AI code yet, but from the discussion, perhaps
it's overly deterministic.  Perhaps adding some randomness and feedback
would improve things, and make it more capable?

For example, rather than choose one best answer, perhaps having it score
the top 4 or 5 uses for a unit, and assigning them to those plans based
on the weights for those uses rather than trying to pick the best plan
always?  I know in Alpha Centauri and Civ II I sometimes use offensive
units as explorers either because their survival chances are better, or
because they don't have a good use other than exploring at that
particular time.

Another, probably harder, change would be to add "furtur worth"
calculations to the process of selecting plans.  I.e.; for money, if I
believe I can get a rate of return of 4% on an investment, then $1000
now is worth about the same as $1480 in 10 years.  It's been quite a few
years since my course on "rational decision making and risk management",
but from the discussion threads I've been reading on this list, the AI
was designed to make the best immediate decision, rather than managing
risk, and ignores future risk/benefit analysis entirely.  

Longer term, a GA feedback system to evaluate the unit values assigned
by the designer would be nice, and a GP system would be even more
desirable.  And a lot of work.  I've been taling off and on with a
friend that's into AI off and on about it (He's a teacher in CS over at
University of Houston).  I have too many current Xconq projects to work
on to do anything serious about it right now, but maybe I can work on a
gplayer for Xconq 8.0. :-)

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Stanley M. Sutton                sutton@earthdecision.com
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