Re: AI (very long)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>>I think that of the two, it is really the strategy code that is in most
>>urgent need of improvement. The basic problem, as I mentioned in a post
>>last week, is that it is very static and fails to reassign units or change
>>directions of attack quickly enough. One measure of how inefficient the
>>strategy code is, is that the mplayer frequently looses against its own
>>lobotomized clone (the iplayer) which contains no strategy code at all.
>>
>It would be pretty easy to move theater boundaries just by reassigning
>cells from one theater to an adjacent one, although I'm not sure of a
>good algorithm for deciding which to shift.

Yes. Though I would say that the main problem is the mplayer's obsession
with clearing each theater under its control before moving on to seize new
territory. Example: some time ago I was testing ww2-eur-42 mplayer vs.
mplayer. Germany had wiped out all resistance in Europe, and should have
launched an invasion of the United States. However, there was one British
unit left in Arabia, and the German side spent 15 turns hunting it down.
Meanwhile, the German invasion fleet was just sitting in port doing
nothing. When the last British unit had finally been defeated, it
immediately took off for the United States.

>Iplayer wins against mplayer don't necessarily mean that the mplayer
>is inefficient, but they do point to limitations.  For instance,
>the mplayer knows how to explore the world, but once it finds the
>iplayer, the iplayer's "mindless" reaction combined with the usual
>flow of combat will lead it to the mplayer's home base more quickly
>than it would have found it on its own - sounds like a Simons-wandering-ant
>situation in fact.
>
>So the useful thought exercise is - when the two sides are deep
>into combat, what it is that an mplayer could do to get an advantage
>over the iplayer's semi-intelligent but uncoordinated units?

Ideally, it should do what every good general does: concentrate its forces
both in time and space in order to achieve overwhelming superiority where
it really matters. But this requires a comprehensive analysis of the
overall situation that I think the current mplayer is lacking.

Hans