Re: Simplifying Galaxy

From: TK Whipp <tkw100@york.ac.uk>

Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000

On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Michael Hodgson wrote:

> > Interesting enough but several scientists from the Naval Research and
> > Development Center in San Diego have played Galaxy Explorer and seem
> > to believe that the aspects of game play resemble situations facing the US
> > Naval fleet.  There is a proposal in front of DARPA right now to write an
> > automated player for Explorer (with the hope that anything developed
> > would have applications in the real world).
>
> Cool...  Has anyone else taken the idea on ?  It would be interesting to
> see how well a bot could fair against 'real' players, even in an offensive
> role.  Writing a bot to take on and beat the DARPA bot would be even more
> fun..  I don't know why, but I would find that very satisfying.  Pity I
> know nothing about AI :)
>

Well I did toy with the idea of a client which would execute basic policy
descisions (eg fill up industry levels, maintain tech ratio's, build
certain fleet patterns, keep scouting info current).

The idea being that the system has in idea of what proportions of an
empire ought to be engaged in what sort of activaty.  The player is then
able to overide the client on any world they feel like and tell it to do
something different.

I thought that this would mean that a player would them be able to
concentrate on where they want to expand into, the diplomacy and the
suddern rushes (ie add two points of weapons tech just before a war).

I don't think I am up to writting an entire bot on my own... but if you
want to run an all bot game at the end of next year say then I will
certainly supply an entrant.

If we where gonna do this then it might not hurt to supply a standard
library of routines:

eg	float	getTECHlevel(String racename, String TECHtype);
	etc...

basically a simple interface into the turn... then all submissions could
be written in C or Java or even shell scripted (depending on the standard
library), the game run without pause (or on an 8 hour turnaround).  A
website could contain the current turn reports for all the bots and the
rest of us could cheer, sit back and eat popcorn.

just a thought

Tom

References

Re: Simplifying Galaxy
"Richard M. Batch" <rbatch@san.rr.com>
Tue, 23 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
Michael Hodgson <mkh100@york.ac.uk>
Tue, 23 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Simplifying Galaxy
Stig Hemmer <stig@pvv.ntnu.no>
Sun, 14 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
cebra@ids2.idsonline.com (Jonathan Cebra)
Fri, 19 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
graeme@postimpressions.co.uk (Graeme Griffiths)
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
David desJardins <desj@math.berkeley.edu>
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
TK Whipp <tkw100@york.ac.uk>
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Looking for a good pbem
Yoni Rhein <famrhein@worldnet.att.net>
Thu, 11 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Looking for a good pbem
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Thu, 11 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
weertj@xs2.xs4all.nl (Jacco van Weert)
Wed, 17 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000
Re: Simplifying Galaxy
graeme@postimpressions.co.uk (Graeme Griffiths)
Thu, 18 Jun 1998 00:00:00 +0000