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copied!<p>You also need to be careful on your choice. If your algorithm does not have a known relation to the actual value, the standard AI functions will not work properly. To be valid, your evaluation function, or heuristic has to be the same as, or below the actual value consistently or it will guide your decisions in an odd way (which one could argue for chess, even though I think the standard points are fine).</p> <p>What I typically do is find out what is capable and what is required. For some games, like sokoban, I have used the minimum number of box moves required to get one box (in isolation) from its current location to any of the goal locations. This is not an accurate answer for the number of required moves, but I think it is a pretty good heuristic since it can never overestimate and it can be pre-calculated for the entire board. When summing the score for a board it is just the sum of the values for each current box location.</p> <p>In an artificial life simulation that I wrote to evolve pack hunting and pack defense, the scoring system that I used was only to guide evolution and not to perform any pruning. I gave each creature one point for being born. For each point of energy that they consumed in their life, I gave them one additional point. I then used the sum of the points of their generation to determine how likely each was to reproduce. In my case, I simply used the proportion of the total points of their generation that they had acquired. If I had wanted to evolve creatures that were great at evading, I would have scored down for getting points eaten off of them.</p> <p>You should also be careful that your function is not too hard of a goal to hit. If you are trying to evolve something, you want to make sure the solution space has a decent slope. You want to guide the evolution in a direction, not just declare a victory if it happens to randomly hit.</p> <p>Without knowing more about your game I would be hard pressed to tell you how to build a function. Are there clear values of something that indicate a win or a loss? Do you have a way of estimating a minimum cost to close the gap?</p> <p>If you provide more information, I would be happy to try and provide more insight. There are lots of excellent books on the topic as well.</p> <p>Jacob</p>

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