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Exactly! Since we understand that the fun is what matters, there are several games that do a very good job of emulating human behavior with their AI at the game, or what I like to call the 'fun', level. Galactic Civilizations has a great system for a 4X: The AI plays the same game you do, only at lower levels they make more 'mistakes'. I've been fooled by quite a few Quake bots when I was still into FPS, and the marine AI in Half-Life was incredible when released. There are a thousand net-games that pad the human players with computer players, and many times you don't know which is which. Is that a computer player named 'sandy' or just another bored housewife? ####, we always joked that the characters in our Dungeon Siege games played better when we weren't controlling them, and a number of times we'd start playing only to find that one party had gone to sleep while the other continues on, clueless.
So what lengths does an AI have to go to fool you where it really matters, in the game? It's probably trivial to write an AI to beat you in certain types of games, especially given the in-depth game knowledge that someone familiar with his system understands. To truly achieve human-like behavior this 'perfect' model can then be dumbed down with mistakes and slow-responses according to the level of the AI. Maybe the system will "miss" an action and continue doing something detrimental, or it will play favorites with an action that does not necessarily have the intended effect.
In the end, we don't know what will fool you. We'll probably have to do a double-blind where you play with a human and then an AI, and then decide which is which. There's not much of an argument without a concrete system, because we can always make up rules that would counteract each-other's efforts. What do you suggest as an objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a game?
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