You could start at the beginning. Some people are still unaware that the four ghosts from Pac-Man each have a different decision-making algorithm. The red ghost always targets the player. The pink ghost targets four spaces away from the player in the direction it faces. The cyan ghost uses a combination of player position, player facing, and the position of the red ghost to determine its target tile. The orange ghost targets the player when far away, and a home corner position when the player is close.
Those four strategies in combination, along with some global behaviors for pathfinding and behavior modes, are often enough to defeat an unaware player. (search: "Pac-Man dossier")
This introduces the concept of strategic archetypes. Human players have them, too. I, for instance, often favor stealthy sniper strategies. The various strategic archetypes often have a complex relationship web from who tends to defeat whom. The player that always tries to do an early rush to overwhelm slower opponents before they can mount a defense may be easily defeated by a trap-and-decoy opponent, whereas that player may lose to a gather-intel-then-send-ninjas player.
To create a competitive AI, first identify how humans play the game, identify the strategic archetypes, then model your bot to pursue archetypal goals. Then, most importantly, determine when to switch archetypes. An early rusher AI has no strategy for midgame or endgame, so perhaps that AI evolves into aggressive expansion, or an ambusher.
But also remember that the point of the game is for the humans to have fun. Avoid cheating, or overusing a game-breaking strategy. Your bot won't care if it loses, but a human may ragequit if he loses to a bot with a perceived unfair advantage.
Of course, there are some games with no human players. There's the "rock paper scissors programming competition" (rpscontest.com), where players submit algorithms, who then fight each other to the death for rank points. It is interesting to see new strategies rise and fall, including those who win by "cheating", such as by manipulating the match-generating program itself, setting the opponent's random seed, examining the opponent's heap or stack, or causing the opponent to be improperly disqualified for cheating.
Comments
You could start at the beginning. Some people are still unaware that the four ghosts from Pac-Man each have a different decision-making algorithm. The red ghost always targets the player. The pink ghost targets four spaces away from the player in the direction it faces. The cyan ghost uses a combination of player position, player facing, and the position of the red ghost to determine its target tile. The orange ghost targets the player when far away, and a home corner position when the player is close.
Those four strategies in combination, along with some global behaviors for pathfinding and behavior modes, are often enough to defeat an unaware player. (search: "Pac-Man dossier")
This introduces the concept of strategic archetypes. Human players have them, too. I, for instance, often favor stealthy sniper strategies. The various strategic archetypes often have a complex relationship web from who tends to defeat whom. The player that always tries to do an early rush to overwhelm slower opponents before they can mount a defense may be easily defeated by a trap-and-decoy opponent, whereas that player may lose to a gather-intel-then-send-ninjas player.
To create a competitive AI, first identify how humans play the game, identify the strategic archetypes, then model your bot to pursue archetypal goals. Then, most importantly, determine when to switch archetypes. An early rusher AI has no strategy for midgame or endgame, so perhaps that AI evolves into aggressive expansion, or an ambusher.
But also remember that the point of the game is for the humans to have fun. Avoid cheating, or overusing a game-breaking strategy. Your bot won't care if it loses, but a human may ragequit if he loses to a bot with a perceived unfair advantage.
Of course, there are some games with no human players. There's the "rock paper scissors programming competition" (rpscontest.com), where players submit algorithms, who then fight each other to the death for rank points. It is interesting to see new strategies rise and fall, including those who win by "cheating", such as by manipulating the match-generating program itself, setting the opponent's random seed, examining the opponent's heap or stack, or causing the opponent to be improperly disqualified for cheating.