Mostly Harmless…
The BBC website assures me that Elite was released 25 years ago today (more or less).
There have been loads of ports/re-imaginings since then and one of my favourites is Oolite. It was originally developed for Mac OS X, but I’m led to believe that it has been added to the Ubuntu repositories too.
The learning curve is a bit steep, but it’s well worth a look if you want to play at being Han Solo!
I saw an interesting Gamasutra article on Slashdot today about creating game AI which is “stupid” enough to be beatable, but “intelligent” enough to make realistic mistakes.
Taking poker as an example:
For weak poker AI, an intelligent mistake consists of figuring out what you should do, and then not doing it, so long as not doing it does not make you look stupid.
For example, if the human player just put in a big raise, yet you know there’s a 75 percent chance your hand is the best, then an intelligent mistake would be to fold. The odds are the AI would win, yet we are simulating a weak human player, and weak human players often fold to a large raise when they are unclear on their odds.
Conversely, weak human players often call when their chances are weak. It’s a natural thing to do and allows us to reduce the strength of the AI player, without it looking artificially stupid.
There’s also mention of a fairly cool sounding chess program:
The programmers of Fritz hit upon a solution that involved the AI deliberately setting up situations that the human player could exploit (with some thought) that would allow the human to gain a positional or piece advantage. Once the human player gained the advantage, the AI would resume trying to win.
At no point here is the AI actually dumbed down. If anything, there is actually quite a bit more computation going on, and certainly more complexity.
