On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 02:53:35PM -0500, Karthik Arumugham wrote: > On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Darryl Palmer Jr wrote: > > Personally I hate Netrek and the INL, maybe because I was a member of the > > team that gave Jitesh's team the fastest geno time on record. My plan is > > to create an all robot team that can kick those INL weenies. This is just > > one step in my overall plan. > A bot that can out-dogfight humans most of the time? Possible. A bot that > can out-clue a human and actually win the game? Doubtful. Why not? :-) *Especially* since, at least theoretically, the bots could work as a single unit with relatively instant response times. Legs and arms of the same body that destroys the opposition. As the stupidest example, 'clued' humans will attempt to phaser the cloaker to obtain their exact co-ordinates, most especially during LPS. How much fuel is wasted with 2 or 3 'clued' humans all trying to make their best guess, all possibly missing? If the bots were in communication with each other, one bot could be assigned the area covered by the radius of the enemy ship at all possibly points along its phaser line, with a preference offered for the ship with the most powerful phaser, at the least range, at the most probable location that we suspect the cloaker is at. (Interpolate his co-ordinates given the approximatings offered by the server every few updates) This would also apply to base oggs. Usually, locating the ogger is half the battle. Why waste half your fuel on 6 incoming cloakers, just trying to find them, when a co-ordinated game of search and destroy would be so much more practical? Also, the computer doesn't blink when its eyelids get a little dry. No more "we got 6 of the oggers, but the 7th got through." Once found, the first one to see him could notify the others, possibly before the others finish receiving their next update. Other possibilities include "I'm going to plasma him, press him away from you and phaser him, and torp him so that we can distract him. The *instant* he phasers you, I'll launch the plasma." One sorta strange slip-up I've seen in the code when I last examined things, is that "detOwn" could be performed on a torp-by-torp basis. The GUI does not give you this level of control. Any torps that are guaranteed to not hit the ogger, should be detted immediately, so that we can lengthen our current salvo during the next daemon update. Co-ordinated planet takes? The bots could communicate their cloaked location to each other, which is more information than the enemy has. "I'm at x,y current heading 270" or "I'm orbitting planet z, current heading 270", potentially including "turning towards 165". This way, the other bots could det only if the torps would actually hit their partner bot. Also, the dets could be organized, such that if two bots were guarding at that instant, they could alternate, taking turns doing the detting. Reactions among several entities, co-ordinated to within a 1/10 of a second of each other? Not being able to take on an INL team? hmm.... Just some examples of how *theoretically* a bot team could be significantly better than a human team. Certain other aids are usually not as useful to clued players (such as having the clients remember the resources that the planet had before the other team stole it back, or having it estimate an army count based on how many armies we suspect were beamed up / down, and how many times, and at what rate, we suspect it popped at. Usually at least one player on a clued team is able to remember this, and a recently taken planet that isn't orbitted very soon after is pretty rare. But then again... if you know what resources it has, and you can predict (with some degree of accuracy) the number of armies it has on it... why waste time sending a scout, when you could be taking another planet, or ogging the other with all the kills instead? mark -- mark at mielke.cc/markm at ncf.ca/markm at nortelnetworks.com __________________________ . . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder |\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ | | | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... http://mark.mielke.cc/