[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [Wishlist] Attitude manager (agent and AI)

[Jason Short <vze2zq63@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Raimar Falke wrote:
>
>
> > On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 05:42:25PM +0000, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> >
> > > > > So I would suggest the following extension to the CMA: once the
> > > > > target multipliers are set, you should be able to evaluate the
> > > > > effect of building a happiness-related improvement.  It would output
> > > > > (for user) the increase in surpluses you'd be able to get (maybe
> > > > > minus the cost of the upkeep).  And for AI you just need to combine
> > > > > the values of increases multiplied by their _WEIGHTINGs
> > > > I don't know how this relates to CMA and I don't know what target
> > > > multipliers you mean.
> > > Now let's consider evaluating impact of a Cathedral.  The algorithm number
> > > 2 above will not give us anything useful (unless the whole city changes
> > > it's happiness status).
> > I don't see a big problem in creating a happiness surplus value based
> > on the ppl_* arrays.
> Well it would be useless, that's the problem.  The value of happiness is 
> to allow more people to work.  To estimate the effect of them working 
> you'd need to estimate F/S/T obtained through their (best) placement.  AI 
> can do it poorly for itself, CMA can do it perfectly for the human.
I think you guys are missing (or at least ignoring) something here.

Yes, the value of happiness is to allow more people to work.  A simple 
CMA should be able to evaluate building a cathedral, building a factory, 
 or changing the global luxuries rate.
But where this model falls short again is that it only evaluates the 
current situation.  For example, it is easy to deduce that with no 
miltary units in the field a police station will not provide any 
benefit.  It is less easy to determine that we want a police station 
before churning out units.
As a more extreme example, you've said that the value of happiness is to 
allow more people to work.  Well I say the value of _food_ is to allow 
more people to work.  If a human is using the CMA, it is enough that the 
CMA tell the human what extra productivity they will get out of a 
cathedral.  But for an AI to use this, we need to know more to choose 
our goals.  Spending 30 turns to build a cathedral may give us 2 extra 
workers in 30 turns.  Or we may divert more production into food and 
have 1 extra worker in 15 turns instead of 30, but at the cost of 
delaying the cathedral by 15 turns.  In this case, I think a CMA that 
simply does a linear optimization will not be very helpful - the 
higher-level agent will need to know more.  Alternately, it might be 
possible for the CMA to itself determine the usefulness of food - 
perhaps given an extra constraint of time weighting.
This problem becomes even harder when considering, say, founding a new 
city.  40 units of production + 1 citizen (which we can think of in 
terms of food, perhaps) gives us 2 citizens.  It is basically a straight 
conversion from production to food, but with a slight overhead because 
we have to move the settler.  Then we have to consider how productive 
the citizens are (which will include our increased happiness at the 
current city after reducing our population).  Finally, we need to 
consider that, since granary size increases as the city increases, 
founding a new city will effectively reduce the cost for future growth.
I don't think the agents-AI is at a point yet where we should begin 
thinking about implementing these things.  Things should go forward in a 
straightforward manner until it hits a wall.  At that point hopefully 
we'll know enough to work on the _real_ problem.
jason