Regarding the game play (EDITED MAY 15, 2008), you'll see Options

[Bereth Darkides]

I have rewrote this 5 times because I am non too happy with the extreme game balance problem.
Is there anyway to tone down the power and or numbers of the nuclear skeleton warriors I am facing (at 9th-10th lvl) that does not include playing outside of core rules!

HOLY FAK!

You see I really hate having to cheat.

(PS,,, Vlad what were you thinking)?


(EDITED TODAY GO TO PAGE 3)

This post has been edited by Bereth Darkides: May 15 2008, 07:35 PM

[Baronius]

What I am saying is that for an opponent who's the same strength as the party on paper to be a match for them (which they would be in a pen-and-paper RPG) it would require human-level AI (or at least real goal-directed intelligence), and we're nowhere near that. I don't want to knock AI as an academic discipline: it's made great progress, clarified its conceptual territory, and contributed en route to problems ranging from philosophy of mind to missile guidance, but the underlying problem is amazingly hard and we're still scratching at the surface.

Absolutely. On the other hand, many AI experts believe it doesn't always have to be the primary goal to reproduce (or even to follow) how human mind and intelligence works. In very many cases, it isn't known whether trying to mimic human abilities (or the real world) is the way to go, or not. There are examples in the history of AI when the key of the success wasn't based on such things (and, of course, there are examples for the opposite as well). Of course, as you've said, it's undoubtful that the possibilities offered by (the relevant fields of) AI are far from human intelligence yet (I said "relevant fields", because AI itself comprises much much more than most people would believe). Discussing all this exceeds the scope of this topic, so I didn't want to mention concrete examples and more details.

P.S. just for fun: it is believed that a (biological) neural network solves nonlinear differential equations in analogue form, in real time. Think of your brain, dear reader, it's solving equations at the moment when you're reading these lines!