Hmm i recall Trillion Credit Squadron back in the 80s where the use of computers was almost required to play and being at the bleeding edge of Ai research would be useful
Thanks for providing the name, I've been trying to remember that story for a while now but my google-fu was weak and I couldn't recall any name involved (person, program or game).
I think you're refering to Dr. Douglas Lenat's Eurisko program. He applied it to the game Trillion Credit Squadron and won two years in a row with fleets the other participants scoffed at. The first year he/Eurisko won by creating a largely stationary fleet that could take enough damage to survive long enough to destroy its opponent. It exploited a damage rule in the competition. The damaged party got to select which component/subsystem was damaged. Eurisko constructed a fleet with many small, useless components which could be individually destroyed without impacting the effectiveness of the crafts themselves.
Edit: Reading more about it apparently the primary advantage was the shear number of craft. Essentially a fleet of kamikaze craft that could overwhelm the enemy.
I'm in grad school for AI right now as a result of reading about Eurisko as a kid. Though I haven't followed up on the greater vision, my thesis proposal a few years ago pitched the project of building a Eurisko-style discovery system for game design: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/proposal/amsmith-proposal...
Also, the fact that I had a good experience playing an "academic" class character in Traveller during college was also an influence in deciding to go to grad school. I haven't seen this class in any other RPG.
Yes that was what I was thinking of i was always struck by the fact the book (in 1980) had the line "a personal computer would be useful"
Ironically Elite was a rip off of the basic starship combat rules in Traveller and i did try and write a game on our PDP 11/03 / VT55 using Traveler as a base.
