[Freeciv-Dev] client-side AI

[Guillermo López Alejos <glalejos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following to the freeciv-ai mailing list:

"
Long time since my last post. Perhaps some of you can remember that I
was developing my final career project (working on the text interface
Puppeteer). Now my final career project is finished and I want to
acknowledge everyone for the help given during my project.

This project has leaded me to think about the design of the AI in
FreeCiv. I believe that the best (but most difficult) design for the
AI is to have the AI player completely separated from the FreeCiv code
(both CivServer and CivClient). Then the AI player controls the
CivClient trough an appropriate interface (in my case, Puppeteer), so
it's treated as another "usual" player.

I have three (good :) reasons for doing this:
   - FreeCiv code doesn't need to handle the AI players data structures.
   - The AI player can be implemented in a language different than C.
CLIPS (or perhaps CLISP) are more appropriated languages for this.
   - The AI player is seen by the rest of the components of the game
as a human player.
"

Benoit Hudson (from freeciv-ai) answered me:

"
Two reasons not to do this:
- lots of work
- computationally more expensive
- the AI would (at least temporarily) get stupider, since it
 sometimes cheats, unless I'm mistaken.

One more reason to do this:
- probably makes it easier to have different AI players with different
 strategies ; in particular, it means we can have AI player
 competitions.
"

I want to discuss this with people of the freeciv-dev mailing list.

Best regards,

Guillermo