---
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