Sulla's Civilization 4 Walkthrough

A couple of things that I noticed while reading through Sulla's Walkthrough: 1) Why not have water towers replace aquaducts in the modern age? 2) Sulla say that the AI will never be as good as human players. If it is in chess, why can't it be in Civ?

jhobson said:

A couple of things that I noticed while reading through Sulla's Walkthrough: 1) Why not have water towers replace aquaducts in the modern age? :

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I don't recall there being water towers in the game.

jhobson said:

2) Sulla say that the AI will never be as good as human players. If it is in chess, why can't it be in Civ?

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I guess there are thousands more variables in civ that the AI would have to consider then in chess.

Comparing civ to chess isn't a good comparison.

Chess is straight-forward. 1vs1. Objective is always to capture your opponents king. Your pieces can only move in a predetermined fashion. Yes there's millions of possible combinations, but it's pretty straightforward and most times, mathematically there is a clear best choice.

Civ has such variety in victory conditions, buildings, units, diplomacy, cities, resources, etc, etc that often times there isn't a best clear cut choice. Circumstances and events can rapidly change. Not to mention rather then just 1 opponent, you can have up to 23 opponents.

All this creates a much more complex scenario where frequently there isn't a best option. Humans are far more adaptable then computers. Humans can adept readily to changing situations, computers can only choose from what they've been programmed to do.

To put it another way, one of my CS profs always loves to say "Humans are smart, but really slow, computers are stupid, but really fast."

Another thing to keep in mind is that the best chess AIs have "memorized" long series' of moves that result in the optimal situation. There's so much more you can do in Civ compared with chess that "memorizing" everything would be many, many, many times harder.