I've been poking at AI off and on for a few years, but to be clear, I'm not really a programmer...

If you understand the basics of how different types of AI work, like finite state machines or goal oriented action planning, you know that these are basically about making decisions with math. So to alter the difficulty, you find the numbers that control the decision-making and you play with them.

Like, in a finite state machine where guard characters have an "alert" state, an easier guard might only enter the alert state if the player character gets very close, and stay in the alert state for a much shorter time, relative to a guard set to a higher difficulty. If it's a more complicated system like GOAP, the AI does a quick calculation involving "costs" of different possible actions. You can artificially increase the costs of actions that would be more beneficial to the AI character, and thus make the AI make worse decisions.

This is aside from "cheating" methods, like just pushing around an AI's aim to make them worse shots, giving them less health, or spawning less of them in each squad, but somehow I doubt that's what you're asking about.

EDIT: If what you're looking for is step-by-step tutorials or code you can crib from, you really aren't going to find it easily. The theory is easy to find, but you'll probably be on your own as far as implementation. I'm not sure if this barrier to entry is intentional or if it's just that everybody who knows how to implement AI code like this just doesn't have the time and energy to explain it in detail.

I was certain you were joking until you mentioned the O-scope.

Embedded systems are a hell of a thing.

It's a common theme these days.

Living in the Midwest as I am, I always wonder if I'm missing out more on the opportunity or the bullshit.

Well, it's a numerical method, so it's never exactly the derivative, but it's an arbitrarily accurate estimate at most points. And it works by evaluating the function at several points that are very close to the point where you want the derivative, so it's like approximating the derivative by finding the slope of a chord line.

Honestly, I didn't do that because I was rushing to get some homework done before midnight and my brain was already pretty well fried by end-of-semester projects and studying.

If I had a bit more time to work on it (or sleep!) I wouldn't have had a word of complaint, probably.

Yes, but MATLAB already implements several algorithms that silently generate points about the given point and estimate the derivative at that point. It's frustrating to discover that they haven't packaged those into the "gradient" function, for example.

You make some good points, but in my experience the bigger challenge is not the logic as people understand it, but rather dealing with the way that logic is applied in a computer processor, and that's just inextricably linked to things like typing. If you don't understand how computers encode information, it's hard to get very far.

... but then again, you do javascript, I do C and assembly. Our disagreement probably mostly has to do with what we're trying to do, so whatever.

"learn to code for the first time"

"typeless"

screaming horror

If you want to do close-to-the-hardware stuff like little robots and embedded systems and video games, C.

Anything else, python.

"comparing parts of image to a local catalog"

This is essentially how jpeg compression already works. It breaks the image into tiles and then figures out how to recreate each tile by mixing together a selection of patterns from a local catalog.

Here's a video that breaks it down. It's pretty good if you can keep your eyes from glazing over.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

No, that's what some people call "positive racism" because you're still stereotyping them, but it's a "positive" stereotype.

Reverse racism is racism against the privileged race, typically white people. This springs from the (utter bullshit) idea that racism is about power, and therefore treating people differently based on their race is only racism if somebody in a powerful position uses it to discriminate against people who aren't in a powerful position.