[Taqwus]

Agreed. SE4 is far more complicated than chess (which machines can do pretty well at), and even Go (which, to my knowledge, machines do not yet do well at). Checkers, IIRC, a comparably simple game (at most... 24 pieces IIRC, on 32 squares with fairly limited branching factor) has actually been solved, 'tho.

FWIW, chess has also been studied for a FAR longer time than SE4 :;, so there's a huge body of expert knowledge for an AI creator to use.

1. Hidden information. This is a biggie. If it plays by the same rules as the human player, normally the AI will not have minimal information about what's on your planets, what's in your ships, where your ships are, how damaged they are, and so forth.

2. Flexible rules. That is, the very customizability of SE4 is going to make it difficult for an AI to do well, since such things as the tech tree and galaxy characteristics can be altered dramatically. Ergo, the limited scripting ability for tech research, etc.

3. *More* pieces and more states. Chess has, at any one time, no more than 32 pieces on the board. Even Go has only 361 intersections, each of which has only three possible states -- occupied by a white stone, occupied by a black stone, or empty. SE4 can involve hundreds of fleets with individual ships, all of whose state matters. Don't bother trying to build a complete state-transition diagram, or even going out to a couple of ply.

4. The sheer number of options. This goes along with the previous three; players can go absolutely crazy with a basically unbounded number of distinct possible turns.


So, at least the strategy layer is going to be rather difficult. The tactical layer may be easier to program, since

a) there is no hidden information anymore,
b) there are fewer participants usually,
c) there are fewer options
d) certain things like seeker pursuit appear to be completely deterministic (e.g. if you know who is a missile's target -- say, because only one of your vessels was in range of the missile launcher -- you can determine its exact trajectory based on the locations of the missile and its target).

I'd be more tolerant of the AI "breaking the rules", at least mildly (some info cheats, as long as they were 'declared'; perhaps production bonuses, etc, but pref. nothing too outrageous like not needing minerals at all), than of blatant tactical combat hacks (bonus speed, say, or bonus damage) for these reasons.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night