Graham Toal wrote:
>
> I had a thought today (while watching "The King of Kong" as it
> happens) which is this...
>
> we can emulate classic video games at what - 1000 times faster than
> real time? 10,000 times?
>
> So wouldn't it be possible to set up a real-time emulation that worked
> out the best play
> for any game by forking at each decision point and playing ahead -
> either a fixed window like
> 10 seconds, or maybe to the end of the screen - so that it could work
> out a perfect game
> in real time... much the same as classic AI techniques are used to
> lookahead in other
> games like checkers, backgammon, scrabble, whatever...
>
> I'm wondering just how much speed is needed to pull this off, and what
> pruning algorithms.
>
> Can you for example play a perfect game just by knowing that you can't
> die in the next
> 10 seconds, for example, or do some games require more long-term
> strategy & planning?
>
> I'm thinking of the classic games like mspac, donkey kong, qbert etc?
>
> I know that various people have worked on AI players for games like
> pacman, but I believe
> they're just heuristics, I don't think anyone has thrown power &
> classic AI techniques
> at it yet?
>
> Would be a truly cool student project by the way, if we have any
> students reading...
>
> G
>
>

I had a vague idea of the same kind of thing, used to find the end
sequence of a game, but I had the problem of doing it statically - it
would not be able to, say, follow branches which were self-modified.

However, because this is done dynamically via emulation, it should work quite
well.

Cheers,

Jeremy.