Re: Bag of Tricks: Choosing actions via the matching law

"Bryan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Totally agree. The wizard game is an "n-armed bandit problem", where the
> analogy is in putting your money in a set of slot machines where you must
> learn the payoff over a sequence of tries. Perhaps read:

Um, not exactly...

Well, sorta. Here's the deal for people who aren't PhDs in AI. AI is
an engineering discipline mostly concerned with finding the one true
answer to a finite, non-changing problem using math. The goal in AI is
to find perfect answers

Psychology is a science that seeks to explain how things really work.
For humans and anyone wanting to simulate humans (ie, games), the
perfect answer isn't always the best answer and often isn't
achievable. And recent studies have shown that, in real world
settings, human decision making processes are often more successful
than engineering solutions like GAs, ANNs, DTs, linear multiple
regression, etc.

So given an n-armed bandit (a slot machine), infinite time, infinite
resources, no penalty for play and no change in anything, you could
get accurate probability distributions using Q-learning or, if you
have a model, TDL or ADP

However, in the real world, you have limits - you don't have that much
money, you can't use all the machines (lest you get evicted from the
casino), the machines are moved weekly and some of the networked ones
change probabilities every few hours. So in real world settings for
common tasks, the AI approach wouldn't work. But if you applied an RL
to a domain you had full control over and which was small/simple
enough or given infinite resources, you could use it

Back to the point, i'm assuming the point of a game is to have an NPC
wizard act like another human. If the wizard has an "AI" brain, he'll
generate very artificial behaviors which make it obvious that, while
it might look like a human, it's really just another damn piece of
software. Whereas if you use the psychology stuff (study of how humans
work, not how to get the "best" answers), the NPC could be as "stupid"
as the player or opponents you might find online

So Brian is right that this could be dealt with using AI (the field)
techniques, but that wouldn't result in AI (software acting human)

-b