And keeping humans involved despite it being the 57th century is what makes it Traveller; otherwise, you're playing in some cyberpunk/transhuman setting. Having human pilots and gunners (and so forth) is a classic application of the Rule of Cool.

On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 3:40 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
On 7/12/2016 1:52 PM, C. Berry wrote:
Yep, I remember that one. It's a fun idea, but I don't buy it. Anything
like "realistic" space combat is going to be all about reaction times
and data fusion, both things that computers are already much better than
than humans. There's a reason that the Phalanx anti-cruise-missile
defense system has to operate without a human in the loop, after all.
And as for randomness, a provably good pseudo-random number generator is
vastly better than a human. Humans are terrible
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Accounting_fraud_detection>
at behaving randomly. I've read that some successful professional poker
players looking to bluff some fraction of the time in a given situation
will glance at the second hand on their watches to make the decision --
e.g., for a 1/3 chance, then bluff on seconds 0-19, no bluff on 20-59.

Agreed.  Putting a human back into the loop to "add randomness" is, in truth, just going to add slow, poor decisions.  If for some insane reason I want that, I can have another subroutine simulate it. :p

As noted in previous posts on this thread, it's just a excuse/effort to justify humans being involved in the process in some (any) capacity.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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