how can intelligent AI boss learning mechanics go hand in hand with un instanced content

Do you have a quote for that "learning" part? Cause maybe I missed it on the wiki. Steven mentioned different AI decision trees, but that's not quite "AI learning" as I understand it.

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I would assume you don't want a complete answer to this, since it would take at least five pages to explain even the base structures that one uses to design this.

So I'll focus on the part where you are concerned about 'weakening a boss by suiciding into it'.

That's not really what Ashes has claimed it will do. It would be a change in capacity during the fight based on performance. Or, perhaps, it will do what certain other games do and 'save' your personal progress against the boss, so if your group engages it, it raises a value that tells the boss how much to unlock of its powers, but is not connected at all to a different raid.

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While this is strictly speaking 'true', I don't think I understand what else you'd want.

Games themselves offer a limited possibility space to players (or they'd be impossible to think about 'balance' in), and therefore any AI will also have a similarly limited possibility space.

AI is about learning the conditions under which to utilize parts of that possibility space. That's nearly always just a small stored Neural Network map on top of the standard machine state anyway.

The 'AI' part has moreso to do with the fitness algorithm over time, which isn't really that hard to do since MMOs can just apply weighting to the 'experiences' of top level bosses. They don't even have consistent experiences.

The game also could add this later, by just 'logging' the entire battle from the boss' perspective and then feeding it back into the system with as many tweaks as necessary, as many times as the team sees fit. So my question would be, what's the difference, other than 'scope'?

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I'm going to assume that you decompiled whatever version of the game you are talking about such that you can say that with certainty, so I won't make any claims about that game.

All I can say is that I know other games that can do what you described that came out in 1999.

I'm not claiming anything against your experience, just noting that your example isn't very convincing/compelling even considering the existence of the AI file.

Anyways, since my question was about what the difference is, and I feel like the conversation will get too long and we'll pass each other like ships in the night consistently if I spend time trying to determine what your perception of AI is, I'll disengage. In this case I'll use the inspiration to work on mine rather than talk about the theoretics.