quote:
Original post by ares32585
One final sorta related question: Simulation is not considered a part of the field of artificial intelligence, correct? So was I wrong to post my question in this forum? Just for future reference in case I have any more questions concerning the subject. 
Ares, i personally don''t consider simulation AI. There''s no formal definition of AI and the field is a lot more nebulous than most, but here''s the definition i use - AI is what people who call themselves AI people are doing. Most people who call themselves AI people do not work on simulations. There is a different degree (Modeling & Simulation) in which almost everyone does simulations. So based on that definition, i''m gonna say that simulation isn''t AI. At a minimum, it''s not one of the top 10 research areas in AI
That having been said, if you didn''t ask the question on an AI newsgroup, where would you ask it? i figure this is where you should ask
i would love to hear how SimCity did their AI (or simulation). i''m sure someone must have written about it by now. But i don''t know any articles personally
SimCity, like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Hotel Tycoon, etc. are considered god games. If you search for "god games" (the two terms together - you can use quotes in Google), you might have fewer bad hits than simulation of business or other search terms
Another option is to search for the names of the people who wrote the games you like and see if you find an interview. Who were those people? Wasn''t it Will Wright and Peter Molyneaux?
A few schools offer modeling PhDs. The big one is ucf.edu - University of Central Florida. One big thing they do is CGF, which is modeling people for RTS games. Not what you''re looking for. But maybe they also do the type of sims that can help you. i personally haven''t seen anything on their site, though, that i think would help
As for how the actual sims you enjoy work, i don''t know but i''m guessing it''s pretty easy. After all, these things ran on computers made of stone with monitors consisting of a parrot pecking out an image on a stone tablet. They had less processing power than a lethargic hamster and they ran the games fine so it can''t have been too bad (in the most simple case). But how did they do it?
Well, having now put 30 seconds thought into it, i''ll tell you how i would do it. First, recognize that the games i''m thinking of are grid based, so i''m going to treat a grid (city block or whatever) as the basic unit. Each unit consumes and creates. You define the what on both of those
Units can be modified. A grid cell can have electric poles, roads, curves and houses. One type of object that might or might not belong to the grid are the agents, things like cars and people. Let''s assume they are independent for now and are seeking the best offer
So what does a unit eat and produce? i''d say a typical unit consumes nothing. A unit + house consumes electricity and produces a signal (pheremone, fulfillment of desire, etc.) saying it''s a good place to live. If true, the unit will send out the signal "live here, i rock" if and only if it''s fed its inputs (here, electricity). So now the little mobile agents want to go there. Only the pathfinding will be a bit tricky because there are no roads. So the unit is inaccessible. Add roads and then what? The unit is somewhere and wants to go to the best place it can. So it looks at its options and if you''re the best place it drives to you. If everyone goes there it might get a lot of traffic which will produce a negative "live here, it rocks" signal which will make the unit look less desirable than other units. And if you have a power outage (because the nuke plant couldn''t produce enough energy to feed all the units) the unit stops being desirable
And so on and so on. You treat the world in terms of units, units have outputs only when they have inputs, units can attract or repel the wandering people (who have to come from somewhere; that one i don''t know) and after that i personally would just start tweaking the resource consumption and strength of outputs until the game felt right. But that''s me
Hope that helps a little
-baylor
