Ok.  I have to step in here...

I wrote Freebot and I pretty aware of what it can and can't do.

First, it was not part of a doctoral dissertation.  It was a product of a
bunch of free time that I had on my hands.  The code was greatly geared
towards being the ultimate dogfighter and I began adding some code to have
it try to do things like take planets.

As such, I'm willing to bet that there isn't a person around who can out
dogfight the thing.  And I'm willing to bet that there are few INL teams
that couldn't beat a team of Freebots.  Could it geno a team of Freebots?  I
don't know.

As far as I know, the only time that anybody has played against a team of
Freebots was very early in the coding of the thing.  At that time, it had
numerous dogfighting bugs which made it a bit easier to kill.

The way I see it, any bot should easily beat any human in a dogfight.  Given
this, the strategy of a bot team may be greatly different than that of a
human team.  Also, a first goal of a bot team may be to win the front line
and the agris and then just maintain that.  I wouldn't worry at all about
trying to knock a team past the core planets.

When I get a chance, I'll release the bot code that I have as public source
and we can build on top of that.

Brian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Trent Piepho" <xyzzy at speakeasy.org>
To: <vanilla-list at us.netrek.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Vanilla List] Growing Netrek - Measures


> On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Mark Mielke wrote:
> > You are telling me that I am approaching things from the wrong angle. I
> > ask you... when was the last time you wrote a bot that could
successfully
> > win against most, if not all INL teams?
>
> When was the last time you did it?
>
> Freebot was the product of someone's doctoral dissertation, and a team of
> freebots isn't that hard to beat.  I think you'll find, like everyone else
who
> has tried, that writing a good bot for netrek is hard, and making a bot
team
> that can be humans is next to impossible.
>
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