I'm talking about the complexity of the *rules*. That is also what Sid was talking about. Go has simple rules. Chess has more complicated rules. Civ has even more complicated rules.

By the way, I know a civ-like that's a very good AI that doesn't need to cheat at all to compete with a human (except in the most difficult levels). That's Galactic Civilizations, www.galciv.com. The trick is that the AI thinks while you're playing, so it gets lots of CPU time.

As I live in Europe and the TiVo isn't available here I decided to build a similar system. I used the following components:

PC with products from NoiseControl.

Hauppauge Win-TV NICAM-Stereo TV-card.

120 GB Seagate Barracuda for recording.

The shows to be recorded are determined from name, category and description using keyword-value pairs and an algorithm implemented in Perl. The shows are then scheduled for recording using nvrec (nuppelrec) and postprocessed using mencoder.

The system works fine, and I record some 15 hours of TV each day. Actively developed open-source systems like MythTV and Freevo are getting close to this functionality now, so there's no reason why the supposedly computer literate Slashdot community should yearn for a TiVo when they can build their own system while contributing to the open-source community.