Hannibal: An AI/bot for 0 A.D
github.com
github.com
Hannibal was Carthaginian (modern day Tunisia); one of the greatest military commanders in history.[0]
His crossing of the Alps during the Carthage-Rome war is one of the most celebrated achievements of any military force in ancient warfare.[1]
0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_crossing_of_the_A...
Most military historians consider the Battle of Cannae to be his greatest achievement- in which Hannibal's smaller folder encircled and destroyed the larger Roman one. Several members of the Roman elite, including Senators and Consuls were killed in the battle.
Maybe it would be better to focus the efforts on an opensource RTS such as 0ad, which leads to less legal problems and less hacky interfaces (for Starcraft 1, by writing in the memory of the game).
As humans, we want an intuitive explanation. For instance with chess, because it weakens certain squares or allows a particular combination resulting in a pawn break.
Unfortunately, these notions arise from our human attempt to understand a complicated game by reasoning through abstractions over the game. Things like pawn structure, control over light and dark squares, and pressure on pinned pieces aren't fundamental components of chess — they're just patterns that help us understand and reason about complicated board positions.
An AI doesn't need or use these abstractions. At the end of the day, all of them can, will, and should be ignored for the sake of simply achieving a superior position on the board. And it's very likely in my mind that moves at this deep a level can't be suggested in terms of a more useful abstraction than, "because it's better than all the other moves".
However, AlphaGo is still training and advancing. I am not sure people will be able to keep up with that moving target.
No, it cannot. It's generally thought that the only salient difference between 'machine learning' and 'statistics' is that 'statistics' attempts to find explanations, while 'machine learning' only attempts to find heuristics that give results.
Don't anthopomorphise AI. It's not artificial life, it's only probability theory plus lots of CPU power.
Plus, there's no way to tell if your AI is any good if you don't have anyone to play against, and if you're doing that, you want to play against the best, which means you need a wildly popular game with a professional drive to it. Starcraft is a perfect fit.
Google also had the ANT AI challenge which was neat: http://ants.aichallenge.org/
Last time I tried playing with it (over a year ago now), it was having a memory overflow error if maps got too big.
Beyond that though, the game was pretty cool.
I'm pretty impressed by its quality. Version Alpha 19 runs pretty smooth on my Ubuntu XPS 13.
AOE2 had some nice ones for training with certain strategies against.
Moddable AI is definitely one of the unsung heroes of modding.
Making a moddable game doesn't require IP disclosure. All that it takes is a bit of discipline around impersonating the 3rd-party persona (dogfooding). It's not hard building a mod framework when compared to sticking to that framework when crunch-time hits. I'm guessing that's one of the reasons that games these days typically lack modability - during crunch time you really don't want developers "wasting time" making sure that the API is clean and used diligently.