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Comment by CoryOndrejka | Hacker News Reader

This echoes the story of Eurisko, a genetic AI written by Stanford's Douglas Lenat to build Traveller "Trillion Credit Fleets." Eurisko destroyed the competition at the national championship 2 years in row.

http://aliciapatterson.org/APF0704/Johnson/Johnson.html

In both cases, using the GA allowed a player to more comprehensively search the opportunity space created by the game designers than the designers did during design and play testing.

Really awesome stuff, though it sets up an intriguing arm's race between the game designers who can patch and Nerf elements to eliminate unbalanced strategies and the players who then explore the new rule set.

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I've been looking for material about Eurisko. Other than this championship, there appears to be no credible documentation of any of Eurisko's reported achievements.

It might be super-duper, but the fact that he wouldn't let anyone else use it, and that those amazing feats have not been reproduced by others despite huge advances - might just mean that there's more myth to truth in the stories about Eurisko.

Adding to the mystery, I read the newyorker article (2009) linked from wikipedia on Eurisko, and it seems Lenat forgot the winning strategy Eurisko developed, or the first article is wrong.

"Eurisko, however, had judged that defense was more important than offense, that many cheap, invulnerable ships would outlast fleets consisting of a few high-priced, sophisticated vessels. There were ninety-six ships in Eurisko’s fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor" - 1984 article

"astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility, Lenat said. They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink." - 2009 article

It's sad that they banned him. What kind of logic is this? Do they really think it would stop other players from doing the same?

IIRC they didn't ban him - rather, they told him that if he kept competing they'd just cancel the competition. This was not out of spite, but because he was so dominant that it was discouraging the other players from even trying.

Create an open 'fight the machine' competition and let them brawl it out. Problem resolved.

Probably, yes. Somewhat closed gaming groups can have fun with an imperfect game if everyone agrees not to abuse the holes in the rules. (After all, rules abuse does not necessarily lead to a more fun game.)

This has been happening over the centuries with games like chess: after enough people spent time on them, openings began to develop. Now we've got iPhone apps to teach use SC2 openings: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/build-calculator-for-starcraf...

How long before there's an app to develop them in real-time, by optimizing for certain constraints?

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