I want to create an AI system to help the player in my latest project pilot a space craft that is forced to obey the laws of Newtonian physics: I have a craft of known mass and moment of inertia drifting in the vaccuum of space. It will have an arbitrary number of thrusters placed at any arbitrary location on the outer surface of the ship. Each thruster has a range of directions in which it can be oriented, but may not be oriented so as to fire into the ship's hull. My problem is control of this vehicle. There may be a dozen thruster assemblies on the surface of the player's ship, and that is far too much to force a person to keep track of. I want to design a system that can rotate the ship to any desired orientation so that the ship's engines may then push the ship to it's destination. Ideally, the player pulls back his joystick and this AI system will command the thrusters in such a manner as to pitch the ship up as best as it can. If each thruster could be oriented in any direction at all, even into the ship itself, I would accomplish this by calculating the torque needed to turn the ship where I want. But instead, I would like the player to face situations where thrusters are viable targets on eachother's ships. I want it to be possible to destroy indivual thrusters and hinder a ship's maneuverability. Making it impossible for an opponent player to pitch up, or stop a roll, for example. I was reading the "Dogfighting AI" thread to get some ideas for how I can do this. But the articles presented in this thread (namely "Creating a Dogfight Agent") are mainly concerned with modern airplanes that have elevators, airelons, and so on, that are not related to this problem. Also, I do not need to determine the proper maneuver to perform, this system is only acting as a semi-auto-pilot for the player. The best solution I could come up with was training a neural network to fire thrusters in order to keep the ship oriented properly. I don't really have any experience with neural nets, can they keep track of a large number of inputs? Such as yaw, pitch, throttle for 12-20ish thruster assemblies at a time? Would a neural network react quickly to the loss of a thruster assembly, or would the ship behave stranglely for a few minutes after a minor system was smeared on the hull by a passing asteroid? I would prefer a nice straight-forward system to netural nets too. I don't like the idea of an AI system that I can't easily debug :( Most importantly, neural networks seem like a very n00b-ish technology to ask about in these forums. I do NOT want to appear foolish, I'm just stumped :/ So I thought I's try polling GameDev for thoughts. You guys seem to have a lot of good ones. Thank you for the your time and patience!

A* sounds intriguing. I'm going to google this a while. Until now I was looking to Neural Nets and Calculus-style optimization.

So it would be kinda like searching for the best path to the goal, but that each "move" is actually a firing of different combinations of thrusters and the goal is the desired orientation of the ship?

As this moment, my code is a mess of stub functions and scribbled notes on paper. So, I guess for simplicities sake, I'll make thrusters aim themselves instantly.

I advocate the use of multiple nets. Have a net that translates the players input command to an output response. Take that reponse and feed it to other nets attached to separate thrusters. The correct thrusters that fire properly will be given a positive response and the ones that dont a slap in the proverbial face. Discipline the incorrect thruster nets that do fire.

Or instead of a supervised net(s), use a GA that has a fitness function that determines whether the response given by the nets was correct and got the payer to where he wanted to go, or discipline that badly performing nets that don't.

I just picked up the same idea youv'e had for a newtonian space sim. Hope that helps.

If you want to get done anytime this millenia then I suggest you treat the thrusters individually. Each thruster believes itself is the only thruster on the ship. With that as a base it shouldn't be very hard to calculate how it should be oriented.

Why make such a small part of the game such a huge project, eh?
Keep It Simple & Stupid !! :D