The AI is not cheating!
My esteemed colleague emailed me in somewhat of an upset state this morning. People are accusing the Frozen Synapse single player AI of cheating! Paul has asked me to write some kind of BLOG POST about how the FS AI is not cheating.
Well, first I can show you:
Start the demo
Get to the main menu
Open the console with ` and type
setRandomSeed(1);
Press enter and close the console.
Click “Demo Mission 1”
Press Escape to skip the intro
Do some plans
Press commit and watch what the AI does
Now go back to the main menu, and do everything again – you’ll get the same map – and give your units different orders. Press commit and you’ll see the AI does exactly the same thing.
I promise you that the AI never looks at what you’ve done when it chooses what it’s going to do.
The AI does know where you are in Dark Mode – we fiddled with it a lot and didn’t manage to get it fun without that.
7 Responses to “The AI is not cheating!”
§ August 12th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
And that’s how it should be. Even the hardest AI shouldn’t ever have more knowledge than the player. The difficulty needs to come from awesome AI programming which takes everything into account.
+1 to you sir.
Does the Frozen Synapse AI have some sort of learning? Would be awesome if the AI gathered information about opponent behavior and sent it to server to create extremely advanced AI which can predict some player actions 😉
§ August 12th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Thanks Fan.
The FS AI doesn’t learn… it’s really a kind of different system to that. A good description is here:
http://www.mode7games.com/blog/2010/11/02/artificial-intelligence-2/
§ August 12th, 2011 at 5:58 pm
Great post! All you need to do now is write a response to “OMG explosives so random and unfair I hates them!!1!” and you’ll have obviated 90% of forum posts.
§ August 13th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
I must amit a couple of times I tought it was cheating if not knowing hwat you are doing up front… then at least live reacting during the outcme…
anyway my mind is at ease:P
§ August 13th, 2011 at 11:04 pm
“The AI does know where you are in Dark Mode”
Maybe I’ve misunderstood but the AI knowing where you are when you’re hidden from it by normal game rules sounds like cheating. Is something else meant by this comment?
I’m not overly bothered by the AI cheating if it’s necessary to make the game fun, but it feels ‘fairer’ if both player and AI play by the same rules. It’s much harder to make a good AI on that basis however.
§ August 14th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
>The AI doesnt cheat
>The AI does know where you are in Dark Mode
wtf
§ September 5th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Andrew Campbell, tommo
The AI being able to see you in Dark Mode does give it an advantage over a human player on that mode. OTOH, it’s not nearly as smart as the player and you hardly ever face it on dark mode anyway.
So yeah, the AI doesn’t cheat (often).