Computers master the game board

August 7th, 2007 by tim finin

The Cristian Science Monitor has an article, Computers master the game board surveying the state of computers’ ability to play traditional games like chess, scrabble and go.

“They reign supreme in checkers and chess. Poker may be next. What other areas will artificial intelligence soon dominate?”

The article is prompted, of course, by the recent news of the surprisingly good performance of the Polaris poker-playing program and the reduction of checkers to a “solved” game. Both of these are great accomplishments resulting from years of work by Jonathan Schaeffer and his colleagues and students at the University of Alberta.

If you are felling like it’s the “end of history” for programming computers to play traditional games, take heart — there are still plenty of challenges. Go is one of them

Some games are still too complicated for computers to master. The Japanese game of Go stands as the usual example. With a 19 by 19 grid, Go has an astronomical number of possible positions – think 1 followed by 100 zeros. Such a massive scale means computers don’t know where to focus.

“They’ve done eye tracking on Go experts,” says Susan Epstein, a computer science professor at Hunter College in New York City. “The studies found that while there are hundred of good moves in front of them, the best [human] players only see three or four.”

Posted in General |

Related posts:

• How to build your own gaming computer
• Do computers play games like humans?
• The New Yorker on Will Wright and Spore

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