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Digital-Chupacabra t1_j9fg4wp wrote

Using the Chess example, the way a chess engine is "smart" is it can look ahead a bunch of moves, and see all the possibilities.

The way you make that "dumber" is you limit the number of moves the engine can look ahead.

To make it more general, you limit the thing that makes it "smart". Sometimes it's as simple as limiting input, see the chess example, sometimes it's more complicated, sometimes it's just adding a wait or a random element. Or a combo of the above.

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AquaRegia t1_j9fgrb3 wrote

In addition to this, OP seems to assume that an "optimal choice" is always an option. In reality, it can be really really hard to make a good AI, so the chess AI you're playing against might actually be "doing its best", because whoever made it couldn't make it any better.

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ThunderChaser t1_j9fk8qw wrote

Yep.

To go back to the chess example, as chess isn’t a solved game, it’s impossible to always determine the most optimal move in chess. Computers can do lots of complex math to calculate what it thinks is most optimal, but it can never be known for certain.

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Conscious-Section-55 t1_j9fwndc wrote

And because of this, one more option is to explicitly limit the amount of time the computer has to "think."

This option is both subtle and powerful. To use the chess example once again, the likelihood of a "missed brilliancy" is not a lot lower than that of an ignored blunder. Perhaps somewhat lower, since the brilliancy may have already been discovered in a prior move, but if I'm forced to think fast, the likelihood of errors increases a lot.

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