>>I've got a rough schema for pattern recognition vai a neural net type arrangement that can be stored in .dbfs.

What's a NEURAL NET TYPE arrangement?? Sounds like something from Star Trek! :) Or if you tell me you'll have to kill me??

>>You really have to purpose build the "net" with much of the heuristic (rules of thumb) level of intelligence pre-built. That's hard :-)

Yeah, in my chess/othello game, I started writing AI that basically assigned different values to different strategic positions on the board. The computer would look at where it's pieces were, what the value of those positions were and calculate which moves would result in higher numbers. It actually worked ok for offense but the real problem was defense. I wanted to have it "learn" different offensive tactics from the human player so that it would know how to defend itself. But it got a little over my head and I haven't really picked it up again since. But if I recode it in VFP, I could use tables to store information that it learns and could scan that info very quickly if needed.

Later.