It depends on how you see it. Deep Blue is nothing more than a Knowledge-Based expert system. Netrek is more compicated and the game-space for Netrek is much more than chess. I am thinking that the easiest way to do it would to be able to assign "roles" to various bots. These "roles" would alter their behavior. If a bot had enough kills and the central AI, or human caption, told it to take a planet. It would switch roles to planet-taker and cause nearby bots to switch roles to escort if necessary. The different "roles" could be individually programmed or better yet, they could be evolved using something like Genetic Programming. The purpose of robot soccer is also to evolve an AI team. The difference with Netrek is that it is closer to real life. You have to control space, coordinate attacks on the enemy, assault planets, and force the enemy back. This is much closer to a military campaign then soccer is. If you look at Huber's and Hadley's paper, some of their research was sponsored by the NSF and DARPA. Who knows maybe someone could use the research for a master's topic for AI. Chess is slightly different then Netrek. In chess you can loose space, you can even loose pieces, but if you can attack and defeat one peace you win. It is not the same in Netrek, if you loose most of your planets then you go and take your enemy's homeworld, you just wasted armies. Now if you focus on first gaining and maintaining control of space then taking planets behind the front, you don't have to worry about the planettaker switching modes between attack/defending/ogg-avoidance/planettake, but maybe even this won't be a problem. If the bots were better at fighting, playing a more ship-to-ship type defense would probably work. As long as the sides are even in a conflict the bots would win out let's say 60% of the time. To win the game, is different from saying that you have to geno the team. If the strategy works to just be 1 or 2 planets ahead for most of the game, that is enough. Darryl -----Original Message----- From: vanilla-list-admin at us.netrek.org [mailto:vanilla-list-admin at us.netrek.org]On Behalf Of Karthik Arumugham Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2001 11:41 PM To: vanilla-list at us.netrek.org Subject: Re: [Vanilla List] Growing Netrek - Measures I'm not sure what plocking cloakers has to do with actual clue. That intangible "clue" is what is hard to code. Coding bots to take planets as well as humans do, making team plays to accomplish their goals, and so on would be quite difficult in my opinion. Not to mention, the difficulty of figuring out exactly what the other team is up to. Winning the game takes a whole lot more than creating a bunch of robots that may be tactically superior to the other team. I think Netrek is a much more complex game than many people realize (especially those who haven't played higher level clue games). Someone compared it to computers playing chess in a previous post. While I don't know much about chess past the basic rules, it's basically a very simple game with a small, fixed number of variables (with a very, very large number of permutations of these variables of course, which is what makes it a complex and interesting game). Netrek has far, far more variables at work in determining exactly what's going on, and exactly what course of action to take. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3043 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/netrek-dev/attachments/20011206/edfe3320/smime.bin