Why an AI for Outwitters is hard to do

[Kamikaze28]

(07-14-2012 01:43 AM)Cookie Wrote:  Yes, probably hard, but not actually that hard. E.g. much much easier than Starcraft.

The perception of difficulty is highly subjective. My primary goal with this thread is to show that AI creation is not something you can do in a few weeks and expect jaw-dropping results and to show what goes into writing one. If you're eager, you can develop a challenging AI for Outwitters, it would at minumum make a good BSc thesis in AI research, I'd wager.

(07-14-2012 01:43 AM)Cookie Wrote:  First step: Remove the fog of war (no need to do this in the end, but necessary when you start writing the AI).

Okay, I see now that there are two different ways to go about the Fog of War for the AI:

1. Remove FoW for the agent and make up for its omniscience somehow.
2. Deal with it the way a human would (through estimation, inference and exploration).

I'm an advocate of approach 2, but I accept the existence of 1.

(07-14-2012 01:43 AM)Cookie Wrote:  Second step: Some kind of goal based search. Goals will be things like taking out units, see a large portion of the board, hitting the base, and create new units. Actually, the branching is not that high in practice, because for many things there will be one or a few best moves.

You cannot pre-define 'best moves' in an AI, it will have to explore states and then decide if they are worth to explore further or not. The priorities of these goals is also something that came up earlier in the thread which is basically the evaluation function for the states.

(07-14-2012 01:43 AM)Cookie Wrote:  The one tricky thing is the balance of building up an army and attacking the base. But this is hard for human players too.

Evaluation function - designing that piece of the puzzle is really hard and differentiates mediocre game AI from excellent ones. You don't want an AI that goes for your Wit Spaces first, no matter the situation. It will have to work from the current state and determine which goals are attainable and how useful they are compared to each other.

(07-14-2012 01:43 AM)Cookie Wrote:  I am not saying it is easy. But also, I don't think it is quite as hard as you make it sound. Summoner Wars is one recent similar game for iOS with AI. It does not have fog of war, but it does have high branching and the players have hands that are hidden to the opponent. The AI is not very good, but it is passable.

I just watched a YouTube review of the board game to get an idea of the game. It looks very much like Hero Academy to be honest. I'm not familiar enough with this game to compare it to Outwitters in regards to the difficulty of creating an AI for it though.
As a developer, you are going to have to ask yourself beforehand: are months of development time worth the result of a 'passable AI' as you call it.