[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#4111) Client-side AI

["Gregory Berkolaiko" <Gregory.Berkolaiko@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The purpose of this thread is to collect the arguments for and against the
client-side AI and to discuss possible dangers and advantages.

PRO:

1. The cheating is absolutely controlled by what server is sending to the
client.

2. The introduction of such AI will promote the distillation of the rules
into a module separate from the server.

3. AI will no longr be in danger of mucking the server up by its buggy
actions.

4. It will create infrastructure for writing AIs in other (possibly more
specialised) languages.


CONTRA:

1. There will be a lag between requests sent by the AI and their
execution.  Everything will become much slower.

2. The AI will no longer have a turn for itself.  The situation will be
fluent.  This makes caching any calculations very hard, especially the
large-scale ones like settler maps.

3. It can be very hard to make a non-cheating but reasonably clever AI.


To be continued....