[freeciv-ai] Re: long-term ai goals

["Ross W. Wetmore" <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:19 PM 02/05/25 +0200, Raimar Falke wrote:
>On Sat, May 25, 2002 at 12:56:40AM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
>> Note there is a difference between a Freeciv AI designed to provide a
>> challenge to a standalone player and 
>
>> the client agents project to do extensive but menial computations
>> that assist human players. The latter are a completely different
>> type of beast whose intelligence capabilities are (hopefully)
>> provided from an external source.
>
>Yes the agents doesn't have buildin intelligence. Or more formal
>speaking: the user has to provide the utility function which says how
>good a given result state should be viewed.
>
>At point up in the hierarchy there will/should/may be some
>intelligence. I have no ideas how this turns out but I'm pretty sure
>that this level is above the management of a single city. The
>parameter to manage a single city are only a few.
>
>       Raimar
>-- 

Good. We are on the same page here (and thus there are significant 
feelings of relief). 

I agree that once the lowest level of mechanical assistants are 
available, a management layer may start to provide more strategic 
direction. But I think this is significantly far out. Freestanding
analysis and control at the very top is even further out. These are 
probably further out than necessary because of the decisions to 
work on detailed individual agents first rather than a dynamic 
framework for connecting agents with rough Syela-like parameterized 
forms as initial offerings.

The code to do memory is trivial and by itself useless. This will 
require both sophisticated analysis and interpolation/extrapolation
to produce data in which old and now inaccurate data is now fuzzed
in some useful way, and data that does not exist is introduced in
correspondingly fuzzy ways. The latter is the real problem that FoW
as it stands exacerbates to the point of killing the AI if it fully
respects the rules. (An AI that only knows about its immediate city
environs cannot even compute the weight for a city founder under
strict FoW, has few trigger events to start building patrol units, 
and thus will probably think that massive improvement construction 
is the only way to nirvana - note this is a correct approach if the
map really does only consist of the known city environs :-).

Since this sort of data munging can be easily simulated by the server
there is no reason not to introduce ways for the AI or a human with
handicapped intuition abilities to have a "server agent" or data
distribution system provide this function during the next several 
decades while AI research and technology is being developed for a 
standalone version.

Cheers,
RossW
=====