Re: [MUD-Dev] Game Economies

[Jo Dillon <emily#thelonious,new.ox.ac.uk>]

Timothy O'Neill Dang (timothy#nmia,com) spake thusly:
> The difficulty of writing an AI to participate in the economy will
> depend on the complexity of the economy. In the simplest of worlds,
> they'll simply be optimizing some continuous, differentiable function

  Waah! Complicated maths things! I'm only a historian ;)
> 
> But is that worth it? Once you have come up with NPC shopkeepers who act
> semi-intelligently as members of the economy, where do they get their
> supplies from? Where do they sell things to if a player doesn't want
> them? To a large extent you've just moved the problem a little further
> from the players without eliminating it.

  Well, the idea would be to simulate an entire economy, not just the
shopkeepers, with enough of a mobile/player ratio to make sure the players
can't /really/ muck it up. So you'd simulate NPC workers, miners, builders
and whatever else is necessary.
 
> > I've played around with the idea and even written some simple code, but then Real
> > Work got on top of me.
> 
> I don't know if your code's proprietary, but I'd love to see it.

  I'll see if I can dig it out. It's about time I handed it to the Devmud
people anyway ;) I believe there have been economists working on agent-
based simulations - I don't suppose you've heard anything about that?
I'd bet their code's a lot more sophisticated than mine!

-- 
	Jo





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