Teaching It To Play

Best conversation of the week, and it was about StarCraft.

ArcoMage is close to StarCraft without fog of war. When your opponent plays a creature you see it. You are not guessing what they have, you are reading what they are building toward.

Which means feeding an AI the board state and its own weights is not enough. It needs one more thing: a read on what the opponent is committing to. A spell is not good or bad in a vacuum - it is good or bad against what the other person is assembling.

That is not a heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb about the board. This is closer to a hypothesis about a person.