How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code

How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code
gamasutra.com

This also reminds how the folks from New World Computing (Heroes Of Might of Magic) were forced to dumb down the AI, so it's more interresting, challenging...

In chess this is doable (the intent is clearer after the fact, and the possible moves are more limited), but think about CStrike for example ... how is your algorithm going to realize that you're protecting a gate because you don't want your opponents to sneak behind your teammates? Even simple questions become hard ... say you're attacking X1 just as a distraction, while your teammates are attacking X2 ... a team uses slight variations of some tactic, it's mostly never the same (different men in charge, different hotspots, switching between X1 and X2, etc ...). Gathering useful statistics about it requires lots of played games and lots of resources, and I don't think it's doable on your average gamer's hardware.

I know, stupid example :) but you get the point.

Take WoW, for example. Right now there are several million players logged in, busy beating the tar out of several million bad guys who are programmed to lose. They are playing, and paying good money, to have the illusion of challenge while winning the overwhelming majority of all encounters. (Why can't PVP replace this for most players? Because PVP implies someone is losing and the overwhelming majority of players want to decisively win the overwhelming majority of encounters. There is no way to accomplish those things without instructing a non-player to throw their matches.)

Let's say we replaced the AI with hired actors who played the monsters, and played poorly. Heck, we'll say the actors can even multitask 4 monsters at a time, all played to a similar level of poorly. At 60 monster-hours (15 man hours) per month per player, Blizzard would be in the red on accounts just from the actors salary unless their fully-loaded cost was under $1 a man-hour. Even if they got away with 40 cent wages for urban China and had minimal overhead this would slash their margins to bits.

So that's why we have AI: to do jobs humans won't do willingly (losing) at a price which is cheaper than the cheapest possible human implementation.