'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."

Comments

Result is specific to AoM?

[Chief Camel Breeder]

This tells us more about the game-play balance in AoM than how to approach games in general. I'd be more interested in seeing these bots play CiV 4 where I doubt that neurotic behaviour would triumph.

Re:Result is specific to AoM?

[arivanov]

Dunno about Civ4.

My guess is that the advantage is limited to games with "learning" AIs, where the AI attempts to extrapolate your behaviour based on your past events. The neuroticity adds an element of unpredictability which will confuse the hell out of an AI that works using extrapolation or neural net training. If the game has a rigid rule based AI there should be no advantage, just the opposite.

Re:Result is specific to AoM?

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

This may finally explain

[Anonymous Coward]

why women always get their way. Opponents simply throw up their hands in despair and surrender.

Re:Makes sense

[try_anything]

Bots also have a terrible inability to fully commit to a strategy or to change strategies quickly. A good short-term RTS strategy often involves inflicting terrible damage through a phase of committed, unbalanced, unsustainable action that also damages the attacker's civilization but leaves him in a position to recover faster than the opponent.

If current RTS bots resemble their cousins from five or ten years ago (I haven't played in a while,) an emotionally-balanced bot would take a bold, successful strategy and "balance" all of the effectiveness out of it, leaving a milquetoast strategy that does no harm to his own civilization and usually no harm to the other guy's civilization, either.

But who cares about some real-time strategy game?

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:Welcome to Lords of the Realm 2!

[VShael]

Also known (though it takes more than 4 turns to do it) as "U.S. Foreign Policy"

Re:Tautologous

[Wyrd01]

So true. I have to piss off my toaster before it will toast my bagel Just be thankful you didn't get the model of toaster I bought.

No, we don't cater to the lowest forms if life her

[SmallFurryCreature]

Everytime you tell a story you have to set a certain limit where you just have to assume the person you are talking too understands your words. For instance, you just seem to assume that I know what an acronym is. That I get your use of the word "drift" what does your racing style have to do with slashdot editors?

This is slashdot, we do NOT explain words like RAM or CPU. If you don't understand those acronyms, you do not belong here. This is furthermore the game section of slashdot and Real Time Strategy is a well known genre of games. Do we have to explain FPS as well? (First Person Shooter) How about 3D?

At a certain point you just have to decide, allright my audience just knows this, and if they don't they are not my audience. If you don't, you end up like mainstream publications that have to dumb down everything to such an extent that EVERYONE feels insulted.

One of the more intresting approaches I have seen is/was (not sure if it still exists) is the dutch childerens news. It leaves out some stories but uses the extra time to more deeply explain the rest so that a person with limited world knowledge (like a kid or an american) can still follow what is happening in the world. You can also clearly see the problem there, they need a lot more time to cover the same event.

So unless you want slashdot stories to run several pages and be linked to hell to wikipedia, you are just going to have to use your own brain. This is the internet, the answer is only a few clicks away.

Didn't I Just Blow Your Mind?

[Doc Ruby]

I don't know karate, but I do know CAAA- RAAAY-ZEEEE!

Re:crazy leaders?

[FredDC]

maybe this goes to show how the neurotic leaders of ages past came to such power. some of the roman emperors were not known for being the most stable minds.

As opposed to todays political leaders who are all striking examples of stable minds?

addiction

[Anonymous Coward]

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.