Finding the Exploitable Flaws

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Games can provide insights into a lot of things, and computer games have come a long way from the clunky early days.

One of the early computer games was "Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War." Laughable now, but it was pretty high tech for its time.

There were a variety of "enemy commanders" you could choose from, each representing a difference in programming. Most of them I quickly found ways to beat, but one commander would give me fits all the way to the point where the game was no longer playable on the available computers.

Crazy Ivan.

No matter what you were doing, Crazy Ivan would just attack and keep on attacking. Since the computer could put all of its forces in motion at once, and you had to select each of yours and give it orders, Ivan would always "have a march" on you.

I gradually found the way to beat Ivan was to retreat if possible. Get my forces moving away from his so that I could mass them and try to beat Crazy Ivan piecemeal. The problem was Ivan would often intercept my scattered forces before I could gather them, and sometimes you just could not retreat from someplace because it would generate troops, and the last thing you wanted was for Ivan to generate more troops.

Things were complicated further by the computer apparently having a "random failure" feature.

My favorite organization was to create armies of just archers, and deploy them in lines as far from the other side as I could, and as close to my retreat route as I could. Even if the enemy was all barbarians (the supposed non archer counter to archers) I would kill some of them when they charged, then retreat, and just repeat until I killed all of the barbarians and any knights . . . the supposed counter to barbarians . . . and archers . . . the supposed counter to knights) that showed up.

But every once in a while I would find my troops deployed incorrectly, the formation order had been changed (apparently something the computer did randomly every once in a while), and my archers would be overrun and wiped out.

This was, however, where one of the other flaws in the game appeared.

The game could only handle a set number of "armies" at one time. Thus, every time I lost an army, I would immediately select one of my other armies and divide it into a whole army and an army composed of one "soldier." This kept the enemy from using the blank "army" slot from my destroyed army to create a new one of his own. And, of course, if I destroyed on of his armies, I would do the same thing. Thus, eventually, the computer could not create any new armies for itself, and over half the armies on the map would be one-man armies created to keep the computer from generating new armies.

Play a game enough, and you find an exploitable flaw.