[Courageous]

One of the reasons it can be very difficult to design an AI that doesn't at least cheat with information is that human beings have intuition when computer programs do not. In other words, they have a vast array of associations to past experience which allow them to relate similar experiences to the new ones. While the various programmers involved with the design of a game may have some ideas of what the strategies ought to be, with complex games there will often be many oversights -- local maxima and minima in the game space if you will -- which will only become clear as the game is played by many human beings with different optimization strategies. Cheating A.I.s are not an issue of programmer laziness: rather, they are a recognition that the state of the art of the understanding of intelligence itself is really only in its infancy and that the capabilities of computer hardware per se are still orders of magnitude too slow in order to affect the solutions which even understood AI approaches require.

Referring to programmers who use cheating A.I. as "lazy" is not only inaccurate but also fails to recognize that in some situations it can be a very good design choice (although, of course, its best to keep the cheats hidden from the players).

Take for example a human opponent. A human opponent might *guess* that his other human opponent would be likely to exhibit a certain pattern of behavior. The human would use past experience with similar context as a justification for reasoning that certain behaviors in certain contexts are likely. The job of implementing something even vaguely like this in a computer game is simply ENORMOUS and might well be beyond the accessible cpu power of the target machine in question. A perfectly valid alternative for the implementing programmer would be to randomly on some occasions give the computer opponent information about the human opponent that it otherwise wouldn't have. This would be a "simulated guess". It is also cheating.

It's not at all lazy. If anything, I'd call it clever.

C//