Over here on BGG:

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/978204/help-me-imperial-swarm-fan-youre-my-only-hope

I've been having an interesting debate as to whether software I wrote should be allowed to play in the UK Games Expo tournament next week.

tl;dr I won't now be attempting to use the software in the competition, but it raises an interesting ethical problem.

What do you think?

P.S. Apologies for making you link to another site, but it would be better in context. Go there, then come back…

In the early days of chess computers bots were allowed to compete. Later, computers became just too frickin' strong to be allowed to compete with humans and so they dropped it.

For me it on 1) how strong the software is, 2) how clumsy the ergonomics are for the human operator of the bot 3) how the physical board state is synchronized with the digital board state. (Custom directionally aware RFID ship and asteroid bases with context aware maneuver templates, anyone?).

I think the more interesting use of software is to build a game simulator and have the software brute force through every possible combination of ship, pilot and upgrade and generate a statistical result set based on that. ("In the 2 million matches played between the Howlrunner Swarm Build X and Additional Damage build Y, the swarm won 60% of the time…").

I don't know if it is the program i have seen, but if so it requires some special rules to operate it. In that case i would say no, as it should be same rules for everyone a tournaments of course.

If you have got something that plays X-Wing like a regular player would, why not at tournaments. I mean as long as it does not take ages to operate the program andall the games go to time, the opponent being extremely annoyed of course… I don't see any problem in it.

But i suppose not everyone would say this since we already had a huge discussion if the official Dice App should be allowed… which IS clearly the case since it is official and approved by FFG.

ForceM, it's not anything currently released. At present it merely analyses template movement, not action choice or what to target, so not at human player level; rather it needs a human to make meta choices. Representing a physical board state requires tweaking because of accumulated errors in moving actual ships.

sozin, in order of asking:

1) poor but improving (see above)

2) poor but improving

3) ultimately I'd like augmented reality (AR) tagged bases on a smart table, but while I'm getting that working I use a virtual board (like vassal) and correct manually when there are discrepancies. That's why (2) is poor.

The idea of a training sim is exactly right. I'm hoping you lot will play my swarms, so they can get stronger…

:-)

Oh okay, i thought it was that html based program that i tried once, where you have to tell your "bot planes" where and at what distance its priority target is, this can be the closest one or you make AI focus a certain ship etc. Then the program spits out a manoeuver and action to perform if possible.

I believe you could not play with asteroids though and you had some other special rules to apply too. A pity i don't remember the name of this thing.

So you are doing something far more advanced it seems. Well should it work some day as you intend it to, i would love to see it, even on a tournament!

if you pub your code to github or somewhere I'd be happy to contrib!