> As I said and as I intend to keep on saying, can you make a creative
> AI?
There's a game called 'TCS', or 'Trillion Credit Squadron'. It began as a
paper game that I played at school, where people used some rules to design
a fleet of starships (of total cost one trillion 'credits', hence the
name) and then battled against each other to see which fleet would win. In
the late eighties someone wrote a program which allowed a Mac to play;
this software is fairly well documented (at least one magazine article and
one chapter of an AI book). The Mac played games against itself for a long
time and then joined the world TCS championship. Two years in a row it
beat all human competitors, then it was banned.
However, the important point is this: there is a loophole in the TCS
rules; each turn the player whose slowest starship is faster shoots first.
The Mac discovered this and utilised it by, when neccesary, destroying its
own slowest starships to ensure that its fleet shot first. To my knowledge
no human player had ever used this tactic until the Mac discovered it.
Is this creative or not? If not, then can we write off all prior human
players as uncreative? Certainly I never discovered this tactic, so am I
less creative than 68020 Mac? Or is this whole "creativity" thing just an
example of "materialism" (i.e. carbon vs silicon)?
Mark
P.S. Is there a recognized word for artificial discrimination against
silicon-based life forms?
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