Wanted: Cheating AI

[Courageous]

This may surprise you, but the field of "aritificial intelligence" is perhaps the most misnamed field in all of computer science. Most of the time, classical AI is about "search" algorithms of various kinds. Some game "AI" (sic) programmers are well-versed in this subject matter, but many are not. It's genuinely difficult stuff, generally only studied in detail in graduate school. Few game programmers ever made it that far, so often they use templatized distillations of the various algorithms, pathfinding being the most common one.

To get a glimmer of how difficult it might be to write game AI, ask yourself -- as a player -- which warp points do I have to defend to defend my entire empire? As a human, you can answer in a split second -- in fact it is likely that your expansion policy is based on keeping the number of entry points to your empire few in order to create the highest concentrations of defensive forces at those entry points.

This is a trivial task that you've done in a dozen similar games. And you know what? It's hard. Really hard.

C//