🚀 go-pugleaf

Jerry Shekhel writes:
>I got away with a really fast and really dumb technique in my Chomp game.

James Hague <exuhag@exu.ericsson.se> writes:
>"Dumb" is the way to go.  To connect this with the computer-controller
>players thread, I find all the talk about genetic algorithms and neural
>networks to be a major overestimation of what is necessary to create
>a formidable opponent (for action games anyway).

dmb@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>Also, regardless of how easy it is to make an overly difficult game, it's
>still hard to make computer opponents that aren't very predictable.  If
>you play any current Pac-Man game long enough you'll get very good
>at anticipating the ghosts' "decisions," because when it comes down to
>it they're all canned.  Throwing in some randomness doesn't help a
>whole lot either; a ghost whose movements are random enough to be
>unanticipateable is usually (in my experience) too "dumb" to be a
>threat in practice.

Well that would depend on exactly how much of a disadvantage to the
ghosts the player anticipating the ghosts is.  In the original Pac-Man
it was possible to predict the ghost movements accurately enough to
for books to be published with the exact path to follow through the maze 
to guarantee a victory.  Essentially this means the pridictableness
of the ghosts was terrible disadvantage for them.  Adding a just a bit
of randomness, enough to distrupt any preplaned path, but without
making the ghosts too "dumb" may not be a bad idea. 

							Ross Ridge

-- 
Ross Ridge - The Great HTMU					     l/	 //
								    [OO][oo]
ross@zooid.guild.org						    /()\/()/
uunet.ca!zooid!ross						     db	 //