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Author Topic: The New Alliance Ships  (Read 20790 times)
Death 999
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #60 on: February 28, 2003, 10:27:17 pm »

Well, I was going to have fitness judged by humans... this will be especially important in the early stages, in which the winners will be those who avoid falling to the planet and ever fire their weapons.

Therefore, a shofixti using the glory device could get an A- or so even if he lost the melee.

Problem, we need a lot of judges since this will take some time...
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #61 on: February 28, 2003, 10:29:59 pm »

If you have the computer judge "fitness" based on the following criteria:

F=A*(did you live)+B*(damage you took)+C*(damage you dealt)

where A, B, and C are constants chosen by us hunams, and then have each ship "breed" a number of times proportional to how high their F is, we wouldn't need human judges.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #62 on: February 28, 2003, 10:51:37 pm »

Here's my idea for a system:

At each generation, set up a tournament of the AI's. However, they aren't fighting each other - you pick a kind of opponent - weak, standard, or awesome cyborg, and give them a homogeneous fleet of something. Do several of these for different homogeneous groups of ships.
At the end, score negative points for each enemy crew surviving, or score positive points for each of your crew surviving.
The results come out as a vector - score vs arilou, score vs pkunk, score vs melnorme.
This info can be used in the breeding program - strategic marriages of one AI line to another to combine strengths and ditch weaknesses. Sexual selection is very important.

EXAMPLE:
we have fourteen Syreen AIs, around fifth generation.
each of these fourteen AIs fights four battles against a standard AI with the following fleets:
4 Syreen vs 4 Mycon
4 Syreen vs 4 Earthling
4 Syreen vs 4 Umgah
At the end, here is a sample of the results:
AI #1: (+28, -40, +4)
AI #2: (+60, -4, -1)
AI #3: (-57, +20, +29)
...
SO, somehow the third AI is really bad at fighting Mycon, but is good at fighting Umgah
The other first AI is pathetic at the Earthlings
Now we can have these strains crossbreed in the hopes that we will get something that figures out how to act around Mycon AND Earthling AND Umgah.

I think it might be a good idea to have certain "behaviors" and certain "regulators"
much as in real biology. That way you can easily turn on or off behaviors to match circumstances.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #63 on: February 28, 2003, 11:24:05 pm »

The main problem with this is that these new AIs shouldn't be competivive with the old AIs, they should be competitive with each other!  Therefore we ought to have our simulations be against real human beings and against the other developing AIs.

Also, you can't just look at how good a strain is against a single enemy!  Your simultaion for a strain ought to pit that type versus EVERY other ship piloted (ideally) by both humans and developing AI.  The OVERALL fitness of the ship is what really matters, after all.  Forget having the vectors, just add up all those numbers into a single number:  how good that AI is!  Then, the best AIs will breed more.

You shouldn't judge the AI based on what behaviors it exhibits (ie firing weapon, hitting planet) you need to look only at the end result!  Look at A) did it win? b) how much damage did it take? and C) how much damage did it deal?  You run ONE ship of the strain vs ONE ship of each other strain and add ALL its numbers together.  This will in and of itself weed out AIs who never fire or who never hit the planet, there is NO need to have a human judge it!  Remember your digital multiplier?  HOW the ship wins is unimportant, only if it does.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #64 on: February 28, 2003, 11:41:24 pm »

calm down. I was taking that into account.

If an AI has a good tactic for killing slow ships, and it tries to apply it to fast ships, well, it'll fail. Good response: crossbreed it with something that knows how to kill fast ships. End result: the ai is good at killing all ships.

Also, I wasn't going to train them to fight against the standard AI all the time... if you read my post, you will see that each time you do a judging session you make different tests -
test against Humans: best skill, but can't be automated. Since I expect over fifty iterations, we will need to automate something.
test against Awesome AI: fairly reliable, automatable, but uninspired. not suitable for later stages. Also, will not be suitable for early stages when the original seeded AI's are just learning how to fly, because the Awesome AI will kill them too mercilessly.
test against Weak AI: suitable for learning very basic strategy of attack and defend
test against each other: good on all skill levels, but may end up developing ways of defeating the weaknesses of its own system - strategies that would never fool a human.

Now, as for fighting different species:
yes, fight different species!!!! BUT don't mix them in the same test. Why?
Suppose you have a Spathi AI. The first enemy it is slotted to fight is a Chmmr. Well, the entire fleet gets creamed, and it gets a bottom level score. The next enemy was a Kohr-Ah, and it might have done very well indeed, but it was blocked. THUS, we want to make sure that the tests reflect the ability to manage a battle against a well-regulated field. Thus, homogeneous battles.
However, we mix them up. Each of the AIs has to face several teams at each testing phase. In this example, Mycon, Earthling, and Umgah, run by a standard AI.
Next time might be Zoq-Fot-Pik, Ur-Quan, and Ilwrath, flown by a Human.
The AIs will train against each species gradually. This will take many iterations. Over time, the AI will learn how to fight all comers at all levels of skill.

See?

Oh, by the way, the last bit about behaviors was about AI architecture, not judging.
« Last Edit: February 28, 2003, 11:53:33 pm by Death_999 » Logged
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #65 on: February 28, 2003, 11:46:26 pm »

Also, adding up the numbers is sort of silly - Suppose one AI is fantastic against most  ships but it gets creamed by the Umgah. Another AI is fantastic except that it gets cremed by the Chmmr.
Now... which of these should have a higher score?
Well, both have valuable information. I'd say, "go forth and multiply!"
However, the score of the one that gets creamed by the avatar will be much much worse than the one that gets creamed by the Drone, because the Avatar has so much more crew to begin with.

Essentially, strengths and weaknesses ARE a vector - and that information should be used, not thrown away. You're going to get much better balanced AIs if you pay attention to that rather than ignoring it.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #66 on: March 01, 2003, 12:42:44 am »

If we're going to go that route we may as well make 25 separate AIs for each ship - one for every opponent it can face.

This would actually make breeding a good AI easier, since strategies specifically good against that ship are more likely to come into being.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #67 on: March 01, 2003, 02:24:38 am »

I was thinking of it, but 25 x 25 is 625. That's a lot of AIs.

On the other hand, testing would be much simpler for each one.
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #68 on: March 01, 2003, 01:22:08 pm »

here is a ai that would be hard to defeat. Grin

int distance2, angle, thrust;

distance2 = enemy.range();
if (distance2 <= oo)
{
 angle = 180 + enemy.angle();
 if ( planet.angle() == angle) {angle =- 30;}
 thrust = 100;
}
else
{
 calculate.lastDigit(PI)
}

Grin
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #69 on: March 01, 2003, 06:51:27 pm »

Quote
Well, BioSlayer, I've seen a near-identical post to this in another one of the threats, and for that reason I don't think this idea really warrants a new post...  but I might as well say something before this topic becomes a vacuous waste, since I believe the topic is very weak if non-existant.


Heh, aren't you just kicking yourself now?  Tongue

Topics transform, that's the whle idea of them. and thisis becoming fairly interesting. do carry on programmers.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2003, 06:52:08 pm by Lukipela » Logged

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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #70 on: March 02, 2003, 12:39:59 am »

Quote
here is a ai that would be hard to defeat. Grin

int distance2, angle, thrust;

distance2 = enemy.range();
if (distance2 <= oo)
{
 angle = 180 + enemy.angle();
 if ( planet.angle() == angle) {angle =- 30;}
 thrust = 100;
}
else
{
 calculate.lastDigit(PI)
}

Grin



Dude, the code from SC3 wasn't released open source - delete that before we get sued!
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #71 on: March 02, 2003, 01:35:58 am »

Quote

Heh, aren't you just kicking yourself now?  Tongue

Topics transform, that's the whle idea of them. and thisis becoming fairly interesting. do carry on programmers.

Hey, I was just trying to inspire you guys to do something with the topic!  Hehe.  And look how well it worked out?  You should be thanking me, not kicking me.   Cool
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #72 on: March 02, 2003, 01:45:53 am »

Well, actually you're right. I probably never had replied top that topic if not for your post. However, I do think that there are less annoying and more civilized ways to energize a topic than that. But if you believe in the end justifying the means, then I suppose it's alright...
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #73 on: March 02, 2003, 02:25:34 am »

Quote

Dude, the code from SC3 wasn't released open source - delete that before we get sued!


That's not code from SC3
it's from Windows XP.
Yep.

What do you mean it has nothing to do with Windows?! They both suck! Tongue
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Re: The New Alliance Ships
« Reply #74 on: March 02, 2003, 02:26:29 am »

Well, I wasn't trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that... in fact, there was already a post dealing with the topic proposed on the board at the time.  I just thought that since no one was replying to the post, I should step in and say something.  Obviously if I hadn't, we wouldn't be here today.  Hehe.  You can thank me later.   Grin

I was simply trying to point out that the idea of "merging" ships to create a super ship was not the point of SC2, it was to embrace the uniqueness of these ships and to tactically battle them to result in big explosions.

And I don't think I displayed any "high horse attitude", as BioSlayer described it in my reply... I'm just a simple, passive Canadian boy who can be critical, but fair in my assessments.  Is constructive criticism really a crime?   Cool  It was simply a matter that the same discussion was going on in another topic, and this seemed like re-hashing of the same old trail...  And hey, I guess you proved me wrong, didn't you?  Hehe, so why complain about it now?   Wink

By the way, you do notice this entire topic (basically) only involves two people posting back and forth over and over again?  I don't often use the word monopoly, but I believe you've monopolized this topic, lol.   Grin  You may have even pornogrophied this board, if that's at all possible.  I bow down to your holiness, hehe.   Roll Eyes
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