[simonh]

I suppose what I mean is, in the context of a computer game where you’re playing a computer, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about cheating. The way the game works is the rules. There may be different rules for the human and AI players, but the expectation that they are the same is an assumption ported over from board games. It’s not really a thing in native computer games. For example nobody expects the computer opponents in a FPS to obey the same rules as the human player. So I don’t think cheating is really an applicable term.

[int_19h]

My point is that it's kinda weird to claim that we had AI that was so good at opportunistically playing "like a human" by e.g. picking on poorly defended cities that human players hated it, but then admit that its proficiency is at least in part because it knows the whole map - that, by definition, is not "like a human".

[simonh]

The means is not human like, but the behaviour might well be. A human might conduct a search with scout units and intuit city locations from observed units and such to identify and target cities. Doing that in software might be infeasible, so you give the model full information and maybe program in a delay based on the distance to enemy cities before targeting them. The implementation is different but the behaviour ends up being hard for human players to distinguish.