On Sat, 31 Aug 2002 gjjrs0somx001@sneakemail.com wrote:

...

(No cybernetics either; it's just a board game.)

It looks more involved than just a board game.

Yes, I'm prolly guilty of going overboard in the other direction.

You have to manage funds in bidding on move priority, and since there are multiple players and the turn order is indeterminant, I don't think a stock alpha-beta lookahead strategy is going to work that well.

True, but it should work. A random move strategy would *work*, in the sense of playing the game.

Implementing *a* solution isn't so terribly hard. Implementing a *great* solution is fairly hard. But implementing a *winning* solution depends on the other folks participating who are bound by the same time constraints.

Then there is the travelling salesman aspect to picking packages to deliver and what order to deliver them in.

Sure.

All in all, it looks like a very interesting (and hard) problem.

Yes. It's certainly a challenge, but not an insane one when you consider the entire situation.

Cheers, Bijan Parsia.