Originally posted by Beacon
I know this may sound stupid but what is AI?
Artificial Intelligence???

Names:
Tank Warrior
Are me
Obliteration
Destructabation

corny! i know!
had to get the ball rolling.
Well my vote goes for Obliteration!

As for the AI side. Yip it stands for Artificial Intelligence, but this is a very large field of interest. Much like saying oh, it's Graphics.... it covers a multitude of sins. This probably explains why it doesn't sound like your brothers project.

For any AI system to work it has to have a stimulous and environment. That is what we are providing here. The environment is akin to a humans 5 senses. In theory if you take a new born baby deprive them of any stimulus, then they would have no way of learning. This is not strictly a game.... it would be boring and laborious for a human to play, but it is more of a programming challenge. All we are providing is the arena.

What we are doing are providing a simple set of stimuli for the AI program, in this case the reports back from the tanks. We are then allowing the AI to control events and to try to outsmart another AI. For instance, if a tactic of chasing player two's tank results in that tank always heading back towards it's own territory, then the AI might make a reasonable guess that this is what it will do next time and send another tank to intercept.

For other AI projects the environment and stimulus could be quite different. For example a search engine might measure which items from a search people go into. Next time somebody searches for that, they could return the most popular results first. This is very simple AI. Despite what is mentioned earlier AI is not always about learning. An oft quoted example is the Turing Test (now I disagree with this as being a valid measure of intelligence - but that is my personal opinion), it only requires a program to fool a human into believing that he is talking to another human. Some might say that by rephrasing the humans input it is learning... that is a question of symantix, all computer programs react to input of some such.

I hope this explains matters, and if you want to join in your more than welcome, this is all about fooling around with computes and seeing what we can make them do. It's not at all serious.

Cheers,

SD