Matrix\Slitherine..could you please....

[SapperAstro_MatrixForum]

People will hate it and swear never to buy another PC again. Thus the rise of Pads and Phones and Tablets!

Who knows? Might even have the 2nd rise of Apple desktops. The last one was in the late 70's/early 80's until the Commodore 64 showed up. God help us if that is the case.

Ok, sorry to continue the tangent...

[Rtwfreak]

ORIGINAL: SapperAstro

People will hate it and swear never to buy another PC again. Thus the rise of Pads and Phones and Tablets!

Who knows? Might even have the 2nd rise of Apple desktops. The last one was in the late 70's/early 80's until the Commodore 64 showed up. God help us if that is the case.

Ok, sorry to continue the tangent...

And haven't they always said "History repeats itself" ?

[Lützow]

My personal stance on Win 8 is that after 20 years of Windows pc's I picked up a Macbook Pro 15" Retina today. A new machine was overdue once again and I simply can't stand the Metro UI, neither I'm willing to make a Win Live account. Will install an additional Win 7 partition via Bootcamp for playing games and use my 24" display as second monitor.

[Perturabo]

I moved to Linux Mint after Microsoft did the whole activation and installing from system restore CD thing with WinXP.
While Linux Mint can sometimes be annoying, at least they aren't making it intentionally hard to install and use.

[Lützow]

I'm into Linux also, using Ubuntu on another laptop and Debian on my web server.

Mac OSX is based on UNIX as well. I have the bash shell and a complete command set for comfortable system administration. Something like changing rights by chmod or chgroup can be a chore on Windows. It always drove me nuts to see half a dozen of annoying pop-ups (Do you really want to do this?) just for performing a simple task. Not to speak about the cryptic registry where everything got hidden.

[ernieschwitz]

ORIGINAL: Custer
This situation cries out for taking a wargame builder like The War Engine, adding the ability to make an AI and give everyone (not just computer programmers) the opportunity to literally build their own wargame with an AI.

That being the case, you would need someone to create an AI capable of everything. The best AIs are usually the ones that are capable of understanding the simple rules of a game, not all the alternatives that can be presented. AIs that are that portable are not very strangely hard to come by....

[Saint Ruth]

situation cries out for taking a wargame builder like The War Engine, adding the ability to make an AI and give everyone (not just computer programmers) the opportunity to literally build their own wargame with an AI.

Yeah, having a game that allows people to build their own 'wargame' perhaps (relatively) isn't impossible (see TOAW) but having an AI...mmm??).

Now creating an AI to work with the above, i.e. against any set of rules that the can be altered and with any terrain and with any map etc...well, your in HAL territory there.
Unless of course you have scripting (text/html/csv doesn't matter). And scripting [:)]is really programming...

[Saint Ruth]

.

[Arjuna]

Scripting is not real AI. Most games use scenario specific scripting. By that I mean they write a set of scripts which only work for that particular scenario with the specified forces and deployments. The sophisticated ones have conditional branching, so you can have  some variation. But ultimately they are tied to the specific scenario. If you change the scenario or the forces within it or your victory objectives, then you have to rewrite the scripts.
 
A true AI is "generic" in that it can work with any scenario, any set of forces and any combination of victory objectives. It works from basic principles. Fundamentally it must model a decision making process. So it must be able to receive an order, assess its situation, develop courses of action, analyse them, select the best one and craft a plan to implement it, then issue orders down the line. If it can't do that then it will not be generic.
 
BTW the only generic AI that I know of is the one we have written in Command Ops.