[dogma1138]

AI in strategy games always cheats I haven’t seen a single game where the AI wasn’t built around cheating. Once you figure out how it cheats it’s usually a combination of resource multipliers, build time multipliers and not having a fog of war it becomes much essier to beat at any difficulty.

[ben_w]

Not always.

For a lot of games it can be surprisingly easy to make an AI which beats the median player even when limited to just basic strategies, simply by not getting distracted by the gut feelings that humans have.

Even for more complex strategy games like say Starcraft II where that's not enough, there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)

[invader]

Often, but not always.

I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.

There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.

[Sharlin]

Real-time strategy AI is absolutely AI in the standard Russell & Norvig sense of AI. There's nothing about the computer science concept of AI that implies "super-smart" or always trying to outsmart the player (rather than trying to be entertaining).

Continuously shifting the goalposts of what "AI" is is, of course, a well-known phenomenon, giving rise to what's called the AI effect or Tesler's theorem [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

[invader]

Maybe it is, given that the classical AI definition is so broad, it can mean almost anything. But for me, there's a fundamental difference between something that "tries to be intelligent" and something that "tries to appear to be intelligent".

That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.

[stephantul]

Thanks for introducing me to the article! I’ve experienced this myself but didn’t know it had a name.