Testing

I have now run tests against 3 human players, and have begun analysing the individual results for those players. Progress is also continuing with the write up.

Status

I have finished up the application now and have begun testing. So far I have tested the application against one human player and I am about to do another one. I will need to find a few more players over the next week to test against. While I am getting the testing done I am intending to put a lot of time into writing up, which is a little bit behind, and also think about the presentation which we have to make. Also I am going to begin analysing the individual results as I get them.

Status

I have mostly been working recently on finishing touches to the application so that I can test it over the coming week. I have also been gathering further thoughts together for the write up but have not transferred most of them into a fully written up format at the moment due to concentration on the application. Once the app is finished I can put full my concentration, when not testing, into analysing the results and writing everything up.

Status

I have still been concentrating mostly on getting my write up up to date, and that is coming along nicely, I have been working on multiple areas of it at once, so I currently have parts of areas written rather than whole sections. I have also been making some progress on the application, based upon the testing results from last week. I will have to start thinking about finishing the application off so I have enough time for testing and writing up based the results etc.

Status

I have been working mostly on my write up over the last few days, as intended. Yesterday I also did the testing I had aimed to do, and that has been a benifit, although I still need to analyse the data, there have been other observations I have made from this.
A few small points about testing:
As the entity adapted the subject adapted as well, and was able to predict the entities behaviour to some extent. It is unclear at the moment whether this is due to the entity merely not being complex enough to avoid such exploitations, and predictions, or because it is not flexible enough, and this will be something that will have to be looked at.
Testing also uncovered ideas as to the furtherment of the entity, and this suggets that regular testing in order to analyse and improve behaviour is important to creating a well rounded AI.

Status

Most recently I have been working on rounding off a basic version of the AI controlled entity, and should be running testing on that on monday all being well. Between now and then I am intending to work mostly on the write up as I am a bit behind with it.

One thing I have also noted of interest is that my AI has developed a technique of not doing anything at all if there is no threat around, which as it is a successful technique makes sense, however it was obviously not intentional as it is could definately be seen to detract from gameplay. Because of this it is important to take into account that adaptable AI can create behaviour that isn't planned, which can be good or bad depending on circumstances. But does enforce considerable that testing of complex AI entities is necessary in order to try and fix any possible negative behaviours. (Negative in the sense of taking something away from the game, as opposed to not working as a tactic (which will, theoretically, be fixed over time by the GAs))

Status

Recently I have been increasing reliabilty of the Genetic AI, to ensure that any risk it is taking is due to genes and not because of bugs in the entity. It has occurred to me that due to the element of risk combined with the somewhat random nature of a game environment that it is important to establish how risky a given tactic is, so as to help ensure that just becuase a tactic worked well once it doesn't keep dominant if it was a lucky one off. At the same time though it is worth taking into account that a players tactics may change and resultantly could give a similar output as a lucky one off. I have also added a third gene to the entity and am working on rounding off the entity as it is, so it can be properly tested at this stage. Work on the write up is progressing somewhat slowly but I hope to be putting a good amount of time into that over the next week in between rounding off the entity and testing it against a human player, which I hope to do next monday.