Dominions III Artificial Intelligence

[Johan K]

Hi Cherry!

At the risk of being unpopular, there won't being any support for programming your own AI in Dominions III. It would be much work to do and believe almost no one would take advantage of that possibility anyway. If there will be a way to influence the AI it will be mod settings that are easy to fiddle around with.

[Arralen]

I would be interested, but short of time and maybe somewhat unable, too.

Actually, I didn't expect DOM3 to have scriptable AI. Would mean they have to throw away the engine and re-code everything from ground up. Would take at least 10 years IMHO.

As for players doing AIs own their own: There are games where players code the AI. FreeCiv, obviously, but did you check out Civ Evolution (http://www.c-evo.org/)? It's done by one lonely guy, and there are several external AIs, made by players obviously, available. And they do quite a good job (both)

What about an external AI? We would just need the file formats for that, to be able to read them in ... .

That would be not quite 100% of what Cherry envisions, though? If I understood right, you wanted to fiddle with the "MM AI", so battle setup, sitesearching etc could be handed over to the AI in most cases.

Have no idea how that could be done - unless one writes a "turn pre-/postprocessor", which loads the turn file, writes the first 'standing' orders into the orders file, starts DOM3 to have the player have a look at the turn, and then maybe does some processing afterwards, too.

Could even be scripted in Tcl I think, but would be a monumental task. And would need a 5 Ghz CPU to run. .. or wouldn't it? Hmmm .. if done multi-threaded, it could run on 2 CPUs at once (or DOM3 on one and the app on the other), and everyone will have 2 cores when DOM3 finally arrives I'm sure
Maybe even make it a "parallel processor", which peeks into the files folder now and then and reacts to changes to player makes. O.c. DOM3 would need some possibility to re-load the turn and the order file...

Oh, dreaming again...

A.

[Unknown_Enemy]

Johan K said:
Hi Cherry!

At the risk of being unpopular, there won't being any support for programming your own AI in Dominions III. It would be much work to do and believe almost no one would take advantage of that possibility anyway. If there will be a way to influence the AI it will be mod settings that are easy to fiddle around with.

A hasty jugement.
Look at space empire 4 ! Score of players fiddled with AI, improving score of them to the point where none of the ingame AI could handle the heat from the customs one.

There has even been AI contests where all customs AI battled each others just to decide who's the best.

Too bad we'll can't have that on Dom3.

[Valandil]

Interestingly, the P=NP? problem will likely never be solved. The basic stucture of it is such that any proof will probably be unconstructive, i.e, it either is untrue, or it is impossible to proove whether it is right or not. The main problem in understanding this is that NP is NOT the same as non-P. a problem is NP if you can determine whether a proposed solution IS a solution in polynomial time. If someone could find an NP complete problem (that is one that if solved in polynomial time demonstrates that all NP can be)and solve it. the trouble is, if we find just 1 NP complete that is P, we have proved it, but no number of NP that do not =P will disprove it. The SAT gate of boolean computation is a very simple NP complete problem. If Illwinter can solve this, I, on behalf of all mathematicians from Euclid to the present, thank them.

But it won't happen. A minesweeper SAT gate would require all the computing power illwinter has at its disposal. Dominions3 would be impossible.

An'ya i Suotho,
Valandil

[Ironhawk]

Flashbacks of my CS training...

Why are you doing this to me!!!