interview with Aaron Hall

[abkaiser]

aiken said:
Though, if-then's are nice for simple finite state machines, they're not sufficient to write something decent.

I'll sidetrack slightly here and say you *can* do cool stuff with if-thens. It's similar to what chess software like Chessmaster uses - you're just comparing your move with other possible moves, and seeing which scores higher. The difference is - do you have a static routine or a recursive one? From what I understood from Aaron, static routines will perform as we see in Space Empires today. Recursive routines will be able to reach exponentially more complex levels of competition. In AI terms, this comes out to AIs with brutally effective long term plans that can change dynamically (and still maintain effectiveness) as opponents react.

Anyway, that's why I asked him the question: I want to see how "deep thinking" Aaron intends/wants to make the AI. It's obvious he cares a lot about it, but changing from an if-then to a resursive lookahead design would be major, major work. You'd also be introducing complexity that could affect game speed, requiring tighter CPU and memory requirements.

Andy

[Ed Kolis]

Who says recursion wouldn't be possible? As long as he lets us define functions, couldn't we do something like this:

Code:

---

function plan(n) {

  if n > 0 {

    plan(n-1)

    // plan ahead for turn now + n

  }

  else {

    // do stuff for this turn

  }

}

---

We'd just have to make sure not to code any infinite loops

[abkaiser]

Ed Kolis said:
Who says recursion wouldn't be possible? As long as he lets us define functions, couldn't we do something like this:

Code:

---

function plan(n) {

  if n > 0 {

    plan(n-1)

    // plan ahead for turn now + n

  }

  else {

    // do stuff for this turn

  }

}

---

We'd just have to make sure not to code any infinite loops

It depends:

1) We wouldn't be using a commercial development package for this. Like you said, the AI parser/compiler would be done using tools Aaron and the dev team provide, so that functionality is up to them.

2) Would they even want to implement recursion for us, with all the implications we've both mentioned?

3) And how much power do they want to give to recoding the AI versus more limited customization? Space Empires isn't open source. I could even see someone coming up with a really whiz-bang AI mod and selling it for profit.

Andy