Why an AI for Outwitters is hard to do

[Kirenx]

(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.

A few things about Summoner Wars. SW is a much simplier, more straight-forward game. This is because it has to be as it comes from a physical board-game. Thus unlike either HA or Outwitters, SW is structured into phases, a movement phase, an attack phase, etc. This limits what options are available for AI at any one time by a huge amount. HA and Outwitters have a far larger range of options everytime an AI would have to choose. The difficulty for a game like Outwitters then becomes that you have such an overwhelming amount of decisions at once as all the phases are merged, essentially everything SW does over an entire round is an option during a single action. I can't find my scientific calculator at the moment, but someone with some knowledge of statistics could probably whip up the average range of actions in an SW phase versus the range always present in an Outwitters turn. I'd bet the difference would be huge.