[MUD-Dev] Re: Combat intelligence

[Niklas Elmqvist]

On Tue, 30 Jun 1998, Ling wrote:

[snip]

> Here's some thoughts I read off usenet somewhere (rec.games.design?) -
> this is for working out where the battlefront is and to give the AI a
> general idea of what's where why:

This is a much-discussed issue in primarily comp.ai.games, a newsgroup
with a very high signal-to-noise ratio. Recommended.

[snip..]

> I think this may give you something usable.  Important locations should
> have an attractor on them, and likewise repellers for horrid locations
> (for that particular unit).
> 
> Reading the above, it's like common sense but I suppose this is the sort
> of thing you'd wanna instil into something that takes you literally.

This sounds very much like a technique introduced some time ago at
comp.ai.games called "Influence Mapping". Check out the thread at
<URL: http://www.cris.com/~swoodcoc/influ.thread.html> for a very detailed
discussion on this. By the way, Steve Woodcock's AI pages at 
<URL: http://www.cris.com/~swoodcoc/ai.html> provide some very interesting
pointers to information about AI in general.

-- Niklas Elmqvist (d97elm at dtek.chalmers.se) ----------------------
  "A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been 
   universally established as the amount of magic needed to create 
   one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls."
		-- Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic