[PvK]

Originally posted by tbontob:
One of the threads discussed how the AI was able to adjust by reasearching and then modifying its ships to attack human empires without first observing the changes in the human ships first.

I'm quite sure this would be lucky guesswork on the part of whoever scripted the AI's they were facing. I've done SE4 AI reasearch files, and studied what the AI does with them, and I'm quite sure that it does not cheat in this way.

And yes, it is probably the total score. But that is still a cheat in games where we humans cannot see the others score.

It's clearly shown to be the total score in the AI files. I would also agree with couslee that it's not really a cheat - the players chose not to be able to see other scores. The fact that they can't prevent the AI doing this, for purposes of MEE, is not so much a cheat as a feature limitation.

Also, it seems to me that there are so many important things that the AI can't do which humans can, that most things the AI can do that humans can't, are small compensation - the AI is clearly at a massive disadvantage, because the game is complex in ways that humans can understand well, and AI's can't. Some compensation can be made with reasonable techniques like trying to estimate power with the score. I don't think it would make sense to want MM to program a huge separate analysis function to try to duplicate the way humans guess at enemy strength. It would be cool, but not as cool as the other features we got from MM in the time he would have had to take to develop such a system.

PvK