It'd be kinda amusing if someone coded FS2 to have an alternate "SimFreeSpace" mode, where ALL capital ships can have their own processing AIs that think, adapt, and learn on the fly in a mission (yes, make their OWN waypoints, launch fighters at whim, etc) without even being given SEXP instructions... --- would allow people to just dump a bunch of capships and fighters into a mission and play it and whomp, you got a playable mission. And you could save the AI between missions, so that what a ship has learned from one mission will carry over to the next. People could "train" default profiles for the capships (intercepting bombs, etc) to give as templates.
*drools at the impossibility* I don't even want to think about what kind of CPU overhead that would take, though. >_>
Still, it would be scary as hell to be flying a mission where the enemy is completely unpredictable in the sense that its AI will adapt and learn just like a real battlefield commander...all the SEXPs in the world could not possibly defeat a single Lucifer class if it had this kind of brain in it. Cept maybe self-destruct.
Yeah, I'm nuts. >_>
Of course, given such an AI, all hostiles would jump out the moment the mission starts. 8)