[Freeciv-Dev] Re: AI diplomacy and other happy thoughts

[Tony Stuckey <stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 09:57:48AM -0700, Jordan Crouse wrote:
> My local phone and cable companies are making a very heroic effort to
> keep me from getting anything more than about 28k from my house, so
> needless to say, most of my Freeciv play is offline.  As such, I have
> encountered the annoying tendancies of the AI (no diplomacy, always war,
> etc, etc...) - So I though I would roll up my sleeves and give a hand
> when I get a break from my other projects.  And of course, I am most
> interested in working on the AI.  I have noticed a certain amount of
> brainstorming in the mail archives, but to date not a whole lot of
> wholesale changes have been made (still a lot of blank functions in the
> CVS tree), which brings me to my questions:
> 
> 1 - There are a ton of very smart people that work on this project - why
> have they chosen not to work on the AI?

        Real life keeps intruding, the current AI code is opaque to say the
least, there's no unified idea of what constitutes a good AI, and some
people may have problems putting their ideas into code.
        There's also a lack of response to "cut-and-paste challenges", like
the fleshing out of ai_manage_diplomat() that was discussed when it was
first incorporated into the tree.

> 2 - Is there major AI development afoot that hasn't been checked in yet?

        None that I'm aware of.  The client-side AI discussed here recently
hasn't been submitted for inclusion, yet.  Server-side work has been
piecemeal for several versions.

> 3 - Where can I do the most damage? :)

        AI Diplomacy right now, probably.
-- 
Anthony J. Stuckey                              stuckey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"And they said work hard, and die suddenly, because it's fun."
        -Robyn Hitchcock.