[MUD-Dev] Better Combat (long)

[Byron Ellacott]

David Kennerly wrote:

> knowledge base of known vertices with known values.  I'd love to
> hear from a chess programmer or a self-conscious chess player
> about the internals of either intelligence.  How do chess programs
> think?  How do chess players think?

I can't answer how chess players think, not being a capable one
myself, but I can answer broadly how chess programs work, as was
explained to me nine years ago.

The game can be seen as an n-ary tree of legal moves leading to new
board states.  It's an infinite tree, since there are legal moves
that can loop states.  From any given state S, you do a breadth
first style search down at most M moves, applying a function to rate
each state's desirability.  The path that leads to the maximum final
desirability indicates the next move to take.

Dealing with the opponent's potential moves is an added complexity,
I'm not sure how this is dealt with, though personally I would
assume the player makes those moves that minimise desirability (from
my perspective).

The apparent skill of the AI is thus determined by how many moves
you are willing to look ahead, and how effective your desirability
function is.  Most consumer grade chess programs use the difficulty
setting to determine how far ahead they look.

(I heard it said that human players work in the same way, but are
able to take advantage of the human brain's parallelism to perform
the job. And human players who beat the greatest chess machines do
it by thinking more moves ahead than it can, and trapping it.)

--
bje
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