[freeciv-ai] Re: time table for ai restructuring

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear diary, on Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 03:48:46PM CEST, I got a letter,
where Raimar Falke <rf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> told me, that...
> > > > It is quite likely during the process of extracting the current AI
> > > > and cleaning up its various routines and helper functions, that there
> > > > may be one or more tries at a from scratch, or at least fairly radical
> > > > rewrite. If one of these actually looks promising enough, then a push
> > > > on it is quite reasonable and shouldn't be discouraged.
> > > 
> > > A write from scratch should preferably be done as a client AI, and can
> > > live comfortably side-by-side with the current AI. We already have two
> > > such initiatives: Raimar's agents and Vasco's BORG AI.
> > 
> > As said many times, Raimar's agents aren't standalone AI. They [are designed
> > to] handle, not coordinate. You tell them "I want that and that", but there
> > must be something to tell them that, and that something must reasonate that
> > from something. That's the coordination.
> 
> Yes and no. Yes you are right but if we have a hierarchy of agents the
> top one at the top will be given the target "win" or "maximize your
> score". So hopefully at some point in the future the agents will form
> a standalone AI.

Oh indeed, that's true.

> > The Syela AI contains both coordination and handling, but the coordination 
> > is
> > IIRC the most part of it all, and it is also naturally much more difficult 
> > (and
> > at some level you just crack with your head to the NPC boundary and then it
> > either is not perfect at all, is not very perfect and you cheat, or starts 
> > to
> > eat vast amounts of CPU time as it tries to figure something out from the 
> > chaos
> > around it). I'm not sure how easy it would be possible to convience the 
> > Syela
> > AI to use agents as handlers though.
> 
> Primary we don't want to share the handler code but the calculation
> code. CM(A) and the auto_arrange_workers and co. Path finding
> code. And maybe settler and SM(A).

Well, most of the handler are calculations, IMHO; this is only about words ;).

> > Oh, this reminds me about another thing - should "client AI" cheat?
> 
> This is in the archives.

Hmh, yes, I can remember arguing about that, and IIRC the final answer was
"yes", but IIRC it wasn't clear how to do it in practice.

-- 
 
                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis
 
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.
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