[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Client AI development

[Cameron Morland <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

La 2001-04-19, Glenn Taylor skribis:

> I'd argue against this micro approach-- Brooks' subsumption architecture,
> at least originally, suffered from a lack of goal-directed behavior, and
> it's never been clear that the subsumption approach can scale well
> higher than the insect level Brooks originally demonstrated.

But ants have only insect level behaviour, and yet they are quite
successful. Under certain circumstances they will even co-operate with
other tribes of ants, essentially having an alliance. (This was reported
IIRC in New Scientist a few years ago.)

You can even get the idea, discussed by Hofstadter, of the ant hill being
sentient; "Aunt Hillary" has discussions in _Godel, Escher, Bach_ with the
anteater. We try to make intelligence emerge from chaos.

I also disagree that BB hasn't been demonstrated to scale; check out their
more recent work on Cog, a humanoid robot which they suggest displays
human-infant-like intelligence.

<http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/>

> Why is it AI discussions always sound like religious discussions? :)

Because religion and AI are both very poorly understood; many ways are
successful, each believes his way to be best, but the choice is unclear
(to an impartial observer).

I thoroughly support other tactics for AI. I like BB because it's what we
do at work, and it's quite successful for the intelligent robots we build.
Ultimately the choice of the best AI is simple: let them battle it out. If
we all examine the problem from our own unique perspectives, we'll get
interesting results.

(Actually it's not quite as simple as battling it out; requiring a Beowulf
cluster to run "the best" AI wouldn't really be an acceptable solution.)

I would actually not like to make the only AI for Freeciv, because then I
would have no way of verifying it, except for playing against humans, and
that takes a long time.

[Agh, I mustn't keep writing this, I have to study.]

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