Thanks for providing the name, I've been trying to remember that story for a while now but my google-fu was weak and I couldn't recall any name involved (person, program or game).
I think you're refering to Dr. Douglas Lenat's Eurisko program. He applied it to the game Trillion Credit Squadron and won two years in a row with fleets the other participants scoffed at. The first year he/Eurisko won by creating a largely stationary fleet that could take enough damage to survive long enough to destroy its opponent. It exploited a damage rule in the competition. The damaged party got to select which component/subsystem was damaged. Eurisko constructed a fleet with many small, useless components which could be individually destroyed without impacting the effectiveness of the crafts themselves.
Edit: Reading more about it apparently the primary advantage was the shear number of craft. Essentially a fleet of kamikaze craft that could overwhelm the enemy.
I'm in grad school for AI right now as a result of reading about Eurisko as a kid. Though I haven't followed up on the greater vision, my thesis proposal a few years ago pitched the project of building a Eurisko-style discovery system for game design: http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~amsmith/proposal/amsmith-proposal...
Also, the fact that I had a good experience playing an "academic" class character in Traveller during college was also an influence in deciding to go to grad school. I haven't seen this class in any other RPG.
Yes that was what I was thinking of i was always struck by the fact the book (in 1980) had the line "a personal computer would be useful"
Ironically Elite was a rip off of the basic starship combat rules in Traveller and i did try and write a game on our PDP 11/03 / VT55 using Traveler as a base.
I think you're refering to Dr. Douglas Lenat's Eurisko program. He applied it to the game Trillion Credit Squadron and won two years in a row with fleets the other participants scoffed at. The first year he/Eurisko won by creating a largely stationary fleet that could take enough damage to survive long enough to destroy its opponent. It exploited a damage rule in the competition. The damaged party got to select which component/subsystem was damaged. Eurisko constructed a fleet with many small, useless components which could be individually destroyed without impacting the effectiveness of the crafts themselves.
Edit: Reading more about it apparently the primary advantage was the shear number of craft. Essentially a fleet of kamikaze craft that could overwhelm the enemy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko