[Freeciv-Dev] Re: suggestion

[Grzegorz Borowiak <grzes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Mathias Broxvall wrote:

> Sorry to barge in on your discussion... but haven't you all forgotten what
> the most commonly used language for AI's still is? How about if you make
> a nice framework for interfacing custom C/C++ code *and* give guile bindings
> as suggested previously (a long time ago). 

It's quite a reasonable idea!

> The average AI programmer probably knows both C and C++ very well...
> but that doesn't mean that he'll wan't to use them exclusivly. Some
> things, mostly concerning AI, is easier when you're using a LISP and
> can be implemented much faster (programmers time). 

AFAIK LISP is not too good when soft computing is needed. And there is -
many probabilistics and other values, which it's better to compute as
non-discrete. For such evaluation neurals and fuzzy logics are better, and
it's good to implement it as mentioned library functions.

> Some things will be crucial for the execution time of the AI and the
> serious programmer will implement it in C/C++ as extra guile bindings.
> A further advantage of using a scriping language is the garbage
> collection... no mater how good you are you still end up with atleast
> some memory leaks when writing complex C code... which must be
> debugged, and then the AI changes again -> more memory leaks + crashes
> etc....

Memory leaks depend on how much (and how irregularily) you use dynamic
data structures. For AI needn't be too much.

You mentioned another serious problem. How about debugger for AI scripts?

> Well... if you atleast implement a nice framework for interfacing shared
> libaries (written in C/C++) and provide an API there probably will be guile
> bindings shortly... and some serious AI code can be written :-)
> 
> [Does anyone have any use for some graph manipulation algorithms... such
> as finding bottlenecks in a graph (place a fortress at that single non 
> mountain
> cell between me and the enemy etc..)]

I have some experience with these algorithms.

                                         _____________
Grzes                  \_______________________|_______________________/
grzes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                         (_)
http://gnu.univ.gda.pl/~grzes/
'I will not buy this record, it is scratched.'