[JurijD]

Well I have some experience in programming AI and I have to say that there are 2 basic strategies in providing a chellenging AI for computer games.

1. You create several strategies for the AI based on what humas do and let it combine those strategies in a random way hoping it will make something smart.

2. You try and pre-program almost all possible eventualities in a game and the "AIs" responces.

For a game such as SE IV the second option is not even to be considered and the first one is mostly implemented. BUT the major drawback is that the AI doesn't learn. The biggest problem in creating an AI isn't in programming its tactics and strategies... those can be simply random combinations of several hundred pre-programmed ones.. the biggest challenge is making some kind of algorithm that EVALUATES the EFFECTIVENESS of the strategy chosen and makes changes to it in order to achieve better results.

Good results in this area have been made in the field of genetic algorithms and neural nets but the thing is that these approaches are not developed enough to take on the wast scope of decisions needed in SE IV. People tend to underestimate the human brain when it comes to AI. Remember we have something like 10^13 neurons in our brain and more than 10^16 connections between them... thats a lot of "adaptable code". And we had a couple of billion years to get where we are now. It would be silly to expect us to pre-program something even remotely so versatile on a couple hundred megs of CD space...

I think that the future of AI in games such as SE IV is to get the AI on aditional CDs apart from the Game itself. The AI could be (in theory) developed if you put several million adapatable and self-changing genetic algorithms to compete against each other on many millions of games... then eventually you'd get something that is worth comparing to humans. But noone can really answer how long this process would take or how powerful the computers would have to be. But for now its the only way as we are not intelligent enough to write the program ourselves... but with some luck and enough processing power we could make it happen randomly.