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'Neurotic' is Best RTS strategy
An anonymous reader writes "Austrian researchers experimenting with adding emotion to game AI say that 'neurotic' software is best at RTS. They developed aggressive, defensive, neutral and neurotic bots to play Age of Mythology, based on psychological models of emotion. Neurotic bots beat the standard game AI every time and faster than the other personalities."
OK so they made a program that was better than some existing AI for some strategy game whose rules are particular to that game. This doesn't tell us a lot because we don't know how strong the existing AI was, and have no real way to measure that. It could just be that the 'neurotic' program happened to exploit flaws existing in the current computer player. That doesn't tell us much about how well it would fare against humans.
To get a meaningful result they'd need to test the different programs against experienced, intelligent human opposition. Or better, stop messing around with real-time strategy games and design AI for a game whose rules are already well-known. If a 'neurotic' or 'emotional' player program starts beating the 'purely logical' computer engines in chess, then I'll take notice. We know that the existing AI for chess is quite good (and there is a choice of several strong engines to test against) so any advance over that is likely to be genuine and not just exploiting obvious flaws in some existing program.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's a bit interesting. AoM is a game with great scope, allowing for unusually "large" game boards by the standards of other RTS. Consequentially, the AI has had to be somewhat "toned down" from the kind of cutthroat AI you got in WarIII or even startcraft. I'm a big RTS buff, and while I _liked_ AoM I never found it all that difficult. Some games are a lot more forgiving of a failed attack, and that's one of them. You have enough resources and fast enough build times that even if your grand fleet gets crushed, you're probably okay.
Reading the article, (which is freaky low on detail) it seems more like "Neurotic" in this case is meant to signify a lack of caution. Aggressive won every match, and neurotic won every match, but neurotic did it faster. This suggests that irrational risk taking (the article mentions that the AI skews its internal numbers about how many resources it thinks it has) can beat a more cautious opponent.
In both cases it seems clear that aggression carried the day, and that the only real difference was that the AI that lacked caution won faster. To me, that suggests a big problem with the regular AI, because that lack of caution is usually pretty easy to exploit...A counterattack on a resource gathering operation would leave the crazy AI crippled, due to low reserves. The regular AI's counterattack algorithms must be pretty weak, or it's build order is too cautious or something.
I'd love to see a better description of the AI programming.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I know you were just making a joke, but I feel like taking it seriously anyway.
Well, sort of seriously, anyway.
The cultural tradition of women getting their way stems, in my opinion, from the cultural reinforcement of addictive tendencies in men. More specifically, addiction to sexuality. While the male sex drive is strong, cultural influences encourage even more slavery to this impulse, and further incline one to view a low sex drive (or even just a stoic level of self-control) as a lack of masculinity, or simply put, as weakness.
The end result is that men adopt a strongly sex-driven persona which in turn gives their women great control over thier behavior.
In other words, our notion of horny=manly sets us all up to become p-whiped.
The door swings both ways. Biology + cultural reinforcement inclines women (at least American women) to want romance (especially to be seen in public with a man who is showering affection on her). Learn to grant and withold that, and you can start getting your way too.