Worksheet 2

Well this week involved the completion of worksheet 2, which was submitted to Dr Özveren on Wednesday after being given a look over by Dave, who added his comments to it before passing it along.

Basically this worksheet was to get us thinking about a research question (RQ) as well as getting us to think about how we were going to write up our proposal, which I believe is due to be presented in the next couple of weeks sometime. So what I have as my RQ at the moment is:

What are the advantages and disadvantages, in relation to difficulty level of the computer opponent, ease of implementation and cost to the CPU, to using evolutionary learning as the foundation of the artificial intelligence in a real time strategy game compared to the more traditional scripting methods for real time strategy computer controlled opponents?

I have just had a second meeting with Dr King, and he has suggested that this is a bit long for a RQ and i would be better to shorten it using just the key words, advantages and disadvantages, evolutionary learning, real time strategy, and then in my proposal go into some more detail about what I hope to achieve and look at during my project.

The rest of worksheet 2 was about how the RQ would be implemented and I won't go into to much detail about that just now as based on Dr Kings feedback it's likely that it will be very similar, if not the same, to how I research my dissertation so more will be talked about it as I do it. However I will say that the plan for the moment it to look more into "dynamic scripting" as I think this will be the algorithm of evolutionary learning that I hope to look at and try find possibly another method to look at, as Dr King suggested that I may just want to wait see how time permits before turning the dissertation into a comparative study.

I am still planning on using the ORTS engine however, I have seen 2 separate journals that used the Stargus engine and the only reason I decided not to go and use that one is for the reason that I don't know Linux to well and so I would essentially have to learn two languages at once just to run the experiments which, I could just run through a simple program rather than a game if time constraints get to large, however I would really like to have my algorithm implemented into a game for the end of year presentations.

So my next blog update should hopefully be a bit earlier in the week as I am going to send a copy of my proposal, if the information is up on what I need to write for it, to Dr King before having to submit my final copy.

So until then, Feelin' Fine
Stuart "Should have learned linux as a child" Robb