Re: [TuxKart-devel] Ideas for AI

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Aly Merchant wrote:

>   Basic behaviours:
>   The AI would have a list of higher level actions to choose from,
>   something like "visit point of interest", "make wide turn", "make
>   sharp turn" as opposed to something like "go left", "go right",
>   "fire".

The ideal thing would be for the outputs of the AI to be identical
to the inputs that the player provides via his controls.  That way
the same physics apply to AI and players.

However, it may be that we can make life easier for the AI code by
providing a different interface - or even allowing it to cheat by
going in at a lower level than the player's inputs.

>   Value map:
>   All points of interest on the map have a value associated with them,
>   these values radiate outwards and overlay on top of each other.

We'd need to write a tool to prepare that map.

RAM storage for it might be a problem if it has to be held at high
resolution for a large track.

If you'd like a 5 lap race to last 5 minutes with average speeds of
60mph (reasonable for a GoKart) - then the course has to be a mile
long.  That could mean that the 'interest map' could easily need to
be (say) 1000 meters on a side...I'd guess your map would need to be
about 1 meter resolution?  So we'll be eating about a megabyte
for every byte we store in the map.  On lower end systems, that
could become a problem.

If you only need a couple of bytes per location on the map, that
might not matter - but if you needed a dozen bytes per location,
the storage could kill us.

>   And
>   the car just follows the path of optimal value.  Modeling certain
>   things might be tricky, e.g. getting the car to fire at another car
>   might involve modeling the other car as a good point of interest if
>   it is moving faster than you and you have missiles, otherwise they are
>   to be avoided.

Things like collectibles (which might go away when someone collects them)
and missiles make the map somewhat dynamic though.   There are certain to
be ways around that - but it has to be concidered.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>    WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
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