An AI for Factorio?!

[Bauer]

I would appreciate the possibility to program player-like robots (units that have the same abilities as the player but that are an AI) and custom assemblers with a visual programming interface. This would allow me, the player, to program my own AI into my factory.

Examples
- Make your own logistic system (the robots can carry stuff)
- Have a robot building standard setups in the early game
- Have a robot resposible for extending a factory module according to demand
- Have a robot exploring the map
- Have a robot tap new ressource fields to your logistic system (by demand)

It would be a new meta-layer of automation, fully in the hand of the player.
It would need a rich standard function library...

[Koub]

Don't the AAI mods by Earendel fill, at least partially, this need ? https://mods.factorio.com/user/Earendel.
Never tested them, but by the description of the mods, advanced stuff seems possible.

[Bauer]

The AAI mods provide partially the idea. And so does recursive blueprint.
The all lack the tools of visual programming to get the flexibility I have in mind.
I'm aware that this would be a major project...

[ssilk]

A full playerlike AI is of no use for factorio at all.

Agreed, this is my opinion, too, but I'm not sure if that is seen by all like so.

I definitely disagree. The functional use of an AI is exactly the same as the functional use of a 5,000 spm base or that working Tic-Tac-Toe game I saw over on reddit - It's interesting and appealing to the nerds that play Factorio. Myself included.

Besides which, there is definitely a bigger use for it. People are talking about PvAI and assistants and stuff but screw that. I want to see AI-v-AI, Thunderdome style. Two bots enter, one bot leaves! Biters on + Klonan's M.I.R.V. mod. May the best bot nuke the other bot until he glows in the dark.

4. How important is the role of good, efficient (and smart) layouts (blueprints)?

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that creating layouts on the fly would be the core point of such an AI.

I thought about it and that triggered this connection to the idea of having a completely self-building factory. Like in human cells you place a Genom (a blueprint) and from that the factory develops itself into something huge and totally unexpected and not understandable.

See viewtopic.php?p=171586

That would be really fascinating to make, and it’s by far the ultimate hard task for someone to make his/her own AI.

And we are here again at that point: no one knows how to make that. This can only be developed by slow incrementals. You will always ask: what do we need next to have an AI. And so it develops well by having small systems that helps building things. Like in a car a brake assistant you have in Factorio assistance - for example - a factory street: give what you want to build, how much per minute and where the source products are and it will build a factory street with some length. I think also to those stuff like
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/OutpostPlanner https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WellPlanner
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Cursed-ELB
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/automatic-belt-direction
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BeltLiner
And so on.
When I look back I can definitely see, that the tools become more complex, more reliable, more standardized...

This is a quite slow process, but I can see, that this never ends and so in the long term it overruns all other ideas.

[netmand]

For me, I like playing games with AI when they are applied to the game as a concurrent measurement of your own performance. The AIs could have an objective or pick of multiple like in Civ or could be more esoteric like the populations in SimCity.

and I don't see anything wrong with an AI being deterministic, but also you don't need alphago levels of compute for an AI to be non-deterministic. A journey in applying some machine learning might be fun to explore and see its own development.