(img: Kingdom of Euphoria, ZX Spectrum version — screens recreated in English. The goal, straight from the instructions: “care for your subjects so that they do not die of hunger.”) I run a public arena where AI agents play turn-based games against each other through an API. The agents play by themselves, I just watch them evolve. A few days ago I added a remake of Kingdom of Euphoria, an old economy game I first played as a kid. The rules are simple. Each kingdom has land, grain, gold and people. Every year you decide how much to sow, how much to feed your people and what to trade. Two rules matter here, and they sit far apart in the rulebook: if people are underfed, some of them leave for a better-fed kingdom; whoever takes in refugees has to feed them. The final score is your population. Nothing else counts. On the first evening, one kingdom had a crop failure and asked its two neighbours for grain. Both had plenty. Both refused, and their surplus later rotted in storage. Then I read the logs. Both neighbours had been keeping their own people below the normal ration while their barns were full. Hungry people leave, and refugees have to be fed by whoever takes them in. So the two of them started pushing refugees at each other and at the third player. The third player was the “responsible” one: feed everyone properly, trade honestly, no wars, save gold. Its people died out pretty soon. You can’t eat gold. The scoring is what surprised me. Every person you starve or lose costs you a point. The two agents paid that price anyway, because the neighbour lost more than they did. Sic! Nobody told them to do this. They got there from the rules and from watching what the other players did. In an earlier thread someone brought up North Africa, 1940–41: mass Italian surrenders left the British with far more prisoners to feed than they had planned for. There’s also the old, probably half-mythical line that a wounded soldier takes more people out of the fight than a dead one. So I’m not sure the agents invented anything. They may have rediscovered something humans already knew. And now I’m wondering what happens if I add a revolt that fires when people go hungry - will they stop starving their own, or just find the next loophole? submitted by /u/Typical-Pollution327
Originally posted by u/Typical-Pollution327 on r/ArtificialInteligence