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Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by space_debris on Thursday August 11, 2022 @04:39AM (#32423071)
I was wondering for a long time: wouldn't it be possible to create an ML-based AI that could parse CIV games and emulate/imitate human-style play? It would have to be broken down to the respective difficulty levels a human is playing and I guess it would require a lot of input metrics. But people are playing CIV anyway all the time, so there is definitely no lack of data. That way, CIV could move away from giving the AI boni that it often doesn't know to exploit properly, and we could potentially finally have an interesting competition with the AI.
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by the_only_law on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:41AM (#32425395)
I just want strategy games where higher level AIs aren’t just cheaters.
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by buildbot on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:53AM (#32425577)
Supreme commander has cheating AIs that will waffle stomp you seconds after the no-rush timer if that is what you are looking for.
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by the_only_law on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:55AM (#32425611)
Whoops meant “aren’t”
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by buildbot on Thursday August 11, 2022 @12:05PM (#32427788)
Oh that is much harder then :)

At some point in the future I can imagine being able to plug in a pretrained alpha-go model into any game for fine tuning, that would be sweet.

Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by LeanderK on Thursday August 11, 2022 @06:00AM (#32423575)
yes, I would say it's probably possible now but not yet practical. It's really the forefront of AI research and only archivable with a team of top researchers and a lot of computing resources (you need to use a lot of self-play, so AI vs AI). But we still make a lot of progress every year, give it a few years and I would bet that it starts to get practical for game-developers to use machine learning.
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by mtlmtlmtlmtl on Thursday August 11, 2022 @06:30AM (#32423735)
The problem with machine learning for game AI is how expensive it is computationally. Forget about using the GPU for it. Maybe if TPUs became more common.

I think it should be possible to make, not a good one, but certainly a much better one, with a combination of various classical game tree search techniques, it's just that AI doesn't seem to have been a huge priority for the developers. There are even mods for Civ 5 that drastically improve the vanilla AI just through tweaking various behaviours.

Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by LeanderK on Thursday August 11, 2022 @04:29PM (#32431311)
I think those big models all had visual input and therefore understand what they're seeing. You don't really need this for game AIs, it could make those models drastically smaller.
Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by mtlmtlmtlmtl on Thursday August 11, 2022 @05:18PM (#32431836)
Maybe, but you'll still be pretty damn limited in terms of access to the GPU. Games generally tend to push the graphics to the limit. You could make a graphically very simple game and put most of your GPU compute into AI. I'd be interested in seeing a space like that explored for sure.

For graphics intensive games though, you either want something that can get by on the CPU or in future maybe TPUs will become common enough in consumer PCs so you could offload your AI onto that and still keep the GPU for fancy graphics.

Re:Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone by TobTobXX on Thursday August 11, 2022 @11:12AM (#32426959)