Re: [Rails-devel] Route calculation for huge runs

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 1:19 AM, brett lentz <bre...@gm...> wrote:

> Personally, if y'all want to pitch in and use Rails to try out
> different algorithms and see who can come up with the best one, I
> think it would be fantastic. It may even be a good foundation for
> supporting AI, which has also been a long-time dream. ;-)


AI is going to have to be able to very quickly (like in ms) evaluate
possible runs in various scenarios, because it is going to have to evaluate
many options and hopefully a few moves ahead.  For that, it doesn't have to
be accurate, just reasonably close -- but it absolutely has to be blindingly
fast.

For regular route calculation, I would hope it would be better than Simtex
-- I frequently found incorrect runs.  If we get people relying on it and
then they find it produces incorrect answers, then that will be a problem.
 I would prefer to come up with some heuristic for deciding when the
exponential approach will take too long, and then do some approximation and
label it clearly as such.

-- 
John A. Tamplin