I get this part, but why the cow? Because it's the thing that looks closest to a sheep?

Milked like cows?

I suppose, though brainless masses are usually compared to sheep.

Cows are almost as dumb as Horses, so the analogy still stands.

Now we're up to horses? Where did horses come from?

From the Hyracotherium.

... Thanks.

good read!

I think the horses conversation stemmed from the Unicorn conversation we had in another thread.

I know nothing about AI programming and very little about video games, so forgive me if my question is stupid :

Why not allow the AI to "think" longer before playing ? I play computer chess, where there is a strong correlation (although not linear of course) between the program's playing strength and the amount of time its computes before playing. Wouldn't that work in strategy video games ?

I wouldn't mind waiting one or two minutes before the AI plays (for late-game turns at least).

The program could also compute while the human player is playing (many things on the AI side seem independent from what the human player does ; or it could try to guess what the human player will do, as chess computers do). I know it takes me a long time to play, so the AI would strongly benefit from that.

I don't think we need to concern ourselves with it, but your suggestion about the AI being able to come up with better strategies the longer he player takes to do his turns would be bad news for anyone who likes to consider what they're doing.  If it did work that way everyone would be worried about taking too much time to complete their turns.

If I'm not mistaken, GC2 did do something like this (or they talked about maybe doing it, at least) - most of the AI actions were calculated during the player's turn. And it needn't be "bad news" for anyone who takes long turns. For one, most would enjoy the challenge, and secondly AI competence would still ultimately be limited by the difficulty level. For example, if you leave an Easy AI for 10 minutes it's not going to turn into a harder AI - it is fundamentally limited by its difficulty setting (easy AI doesn't have access to the same, better, algorithms that harder AIs have). Having longer to take turns could just mean AIs can consider more things more thoroughly and act a little less predictably, but its decisions wouldn't necessarily be of a higher quality.

Also, you don't really want even easy AIs to act as if they're just clicking things at random - ideally you want them to act as a bad or beginner player. Having more time for the AI to figure out what to do could potentially help get rid of some of those nonsensical actions that pretty much only a bad AI would ever do. I also don't know that much about AI, so I could be wrong about all this...

That's essentially why AI in turn based game tends to be quite considerably superior than in real time strategy games.

In a TBS, the AI has, for all practical purposes, an infinite amount of time to decide what to do - the player's turn. In an RTS, all the calculations have to be done in real time at set intervals which greatly limits the AI's potential. It just can't be complex enough because it needs more time and more resources than it's able to get.

 Also the chess program pick it's calculated "2 ply" move  from it's list as your next move then start searching it's next reply during your turn. If you happen to pick a different move then the search engine has to start over as all the calculations done during your turn are now useless.

Since most TBS has tons of more options then just moving one piece per turn (diplomacy, resources, building more units for example) as well as luck (chess battles are absolute) a chess AI search engine  isn't very useful in other strategy games.

  Just for example let's increase the most possible moves  for each turn to 100. For a 3 GH processor to search every possible reply 8 moves ahead it will take a little over 38 days.