Almost all the other entrants in the final tournament had fleets that consisted of about 20 ships, each with a huge spinal mount weapon, low armor, fairly high agility, and a large number of secondary energy weapons (laser-type weapons). This contrasted with EURISKO’s fleet in almost all ways. Most ships in our fleet did sprout one solitary laser among their 50 or so weapon batteries, but not because it was useful in combat—just to absorb damage from enemy fire (thanks to the somewhat unrealistic scheme by which damage is inflicted on ships which have been hit). After an exchange of fire, most of the enemy behemoths did indeed sink one of EURISKO’s ships, for a total loss of about 15 ships. In return, EURISKO’s 96 ships sank about 5 of the enemy. So just prior to the second exchange of fire, the enemy was down to 15 ships, and EURISKO 81. After a second round of fire, the numbers were 11 and 70. Two more exchanges brought the totals to 1 and 46, and one more round of fire wiped out the enemy. In this scenario—which was the most common one in all EURISKO’s battles during the tournament—there is no need at all to bring any of its specialty ships into the front lines at any time.
The tournament was run in such a way that, after one player wins a battle, his fleet is completely reconstituted and repaired to its original state, in preparation for the next rung of the ladder. […] Its second opponent did some calculations and resigned without ever firing a shot. The subsequent opponents resigned during their first or second round of combat with this fleet. EURISKO’s few specialty ships remained unused until the final round of the tournament, battling for 1st versus 2nd place. That opponent also had ships with heavy armor, few large weapons, low agility, etc. He was lacking any fast ships or fast-ship-killers, though. The author simply pointed out to him that if EURISKO were losing then (according to the TCS rules) our side need put only our fast ship out [on] the front line, withdraw all the others and repair them, and—once they were finished repairing themselves—effectively start the battle all over again. This could go on ad infinitum, until such time as EURISKO appeared to be winning, and in that case we would let the battle continue to termination. The opponent did a few calculations and surrendered without fighting. Thus, while most of the tournament battles took 2–4 hours, most of those involving EURISKO took only a few minutes.
The tournament directors were chagrined that a bizarre fleet such as this one captured the day, and a similar fleet (though not so extreme) took second place. The rules for future years’ TCS tournaments were changed to eliminate the design singularities which EURISKO found. For example, repairing of damaged ships was prohibited, so the utility of the unhittable ship became negligible.
[…]
When rules for the 1982 tournament were announced, EURISKO was set to work on finding a new fleet design. Although many of its best designs and design rules were now illegal or useless, most of the general heuristics it synthesized about the game were still valid. Using the ‘nearly-extreme’ heuristic, for instance, it quickly designed a ship with practically no defense, and that ship filled a key role in the final fleet. Coincidentally, just as the defensive ship made a difference in the 1981 final round, the offensive ships made a difference in the 1982 final round. In each case, their presence caused the opponent to resign without firing a shot. The bulwark of our 1981 fleet was a ship that was slow and heavily armored; the majority of ships in our 1982 fleet were very fast and completely unarmored. Just as most ‘experienced’ players jeered at the 1981 fleet because it had practically no large weapons, they jeered at the 1982 fleet because it was unarmored and it still had no large weapons, even though the rules changes had made them much cheaper.
What EURISKO found were not fundamental rules for fleet and ship design; rather, it uncovered anomalies, fortuitous interactions among rules, unrealistic loopholes that hadn’t been foreseen by the designers of the TCS simulation system. There may be little of what EURISKO found that has application to real naval design; most of its findings pertained to the fine structure of the TCS rules, not to the real world. […]
The fact that EURISKO’s discoveries were synergistic loopholes rather than genuine naval insights is not in itself bad, as our goal was to win the tournament, not break new ground in real warfare. In fact, the very unreality of the TCS rules—as any 100-page model of the real world is bound to be incomplete and have rough edges—promised to aid us in our task. Here was a search space that had not been explored much by human beings yet; most designers were applying analogues of rules that hold in real life, and that yielded them reasonable designs—fleets of the kind the TCS people anticipated. EURISKO was able to walk around in the space defined by the set of rules, somewhat awkwardly, but (thanks to its absence of common sense knowledge) with few preconceptions about what an optimal design might be. Perhaps we will know that the program has ‘arrived’ when it first fails to win the TCS tournament. This notion of a large, unexplored search space, not necessarily well-matched to our everyday comnon-sense intuitions, will come up again and again in the following pages. It appears to characterize those domains for which automated discovery (of both concepts and heuristics) is currently most viable.
The rules will indeed change for July, 1983, including the elimination of drop-tanks (fuel tanks that can be jettisoned; this improves the speed of a ship but may strand it after the battle) and other changes that will force a complete redesign. We look forward to the new challenge.
