On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 6:15 AM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-...@web.de> wrote: > I would also like the AI to run as seperate client (that way it can't > use privileged information from the server at all) or at least seperate > thread. In large maps the AI takes a majority of the time and nowadays > multi-core systems are more and more common. Freeciv would run 4 times > as fast here with the AIs spread over 4 cores.
Just for the record, I'm making a bit of progress again on my client-side AI experiment. I'm back to sending settlers off to found cities, this time in a less arbitrary and hardcoded way. I'm somewhat surprised by how well it picks out city sites, given the crudeness of its calculation. I'd be delighted to share patches with anyone who's curious, but this is really just a hacking-for-fun effort: expect no academic papers on it. I think I've chatted to you about some stuff that flew right over my head, some stuff about Voronoi diagrams and convex hulls. Frankly, I don't understand any of it! I like your proposal for a "wear" algorithm (read: I can at least understand how to implement that). The one thing that may (or may not, I'm not familiar with the current AI code) be new is that my struct strategy understands the time value of money. Founding a mediocre city in 2 turns is, in some cases, better than founding a good one in 20. Also, struct strategy knows about purposes and dependencies: it has a way of encoding that to move a (nonexistent) unit, you have to build it first. Intuitively, both these features feel very "right". Time will tell if they prove to be a lasting asset. I'm not sure if the AI really needs long-range strategy. At the moment everything seems okay with a stateless model, where each new turn starts a fresh cycle of planning. In a sense the long-range state is already encoded in the consequences of choices made in the previous turn: another X shields have made it even cheaper to continue building a settler, so the algorithm doesn't "forget" that it had decided many turns ago to build another settler in order to build another city. For coordinated attack, I can easily imagine reversing this opinion. One thing that worries me a bit is that the client/server protocol is somewhat hostile to client-side AI implementations: they're almost forced to solve the hard problem of computer vision. Some things would have been a lot easier if the protocol allowed for some sort of cookie to be attached to some notion of "transaction". But so far that isn't a major problem; it will be ifwhen I start adding military action. Regards _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
