id: difficulty title: Fallible, never absurd status: blocked dependsOn: [beliefs, doctrine] exitCriterion: > An easy bot loses to a better player by misjudging, not by choosing moves it believes are bad, and never walks into water at any setting. #

difficulty #

Most game AI is made harder by cheating or by epsilon-greedy. Cheating feels unfair; epsilon-greedy produces the huge goof, because the mistake is a deliberate choice of something the bot knows is terrible.

Noise goes on beliefs, never on action selection. The bot always takes the argmax of what it believes. A catastrophic move has to be catastrophically mis-estimated to be chosen.

• Per-feature epistemic difficulty. To-hit is a printed number; anticipating where the enemy will be is hard. Green pilots should make positional and anticipatory errors, not arithmetic ones
• Systematic bias, not just variance: green is optimistic about its own damage and oblivious to incoming. More recognisable than noise
• Veto list: drowning, jumping into lava, shutting down at zero heat. Forbidden at every setting
• Deliberation budget as an honest knob - thinking less, not knowing less
• Difficulty may only degrade beliefs. It may touch bias, noise and budget; never the observation. That is what makes "does the hard bot see more" answerable by reading one file