State of the Art

Abstract

The 1990s brought the renaissance of mind game programming, leading to several extraordinary achievements in machine-human competitions. The best-playing programs surpassed world human champions in chess, checkers, Scrabble, and Othello, and are making a striking progress in Go, poker and bridge.

The volume of research projects and research papers devoted to AI and games is too high to even try to describe the discipline and the achievements in a comprehensive and exhaustive way. Instead, a subjective author’s selection of some notable examples of AI achievements in games is proposed in this chapter, keeping the descriptions on a relatively general level without going into details. The idea is to give the reader a flavor of these influential approaches and methods rather than a formal, technical description of them.

Presentation is organized around particular games. Chapter 4.1 is devoted to chess, mentioning the famous Deep Blue machine and the latest accomplishment - Rybka. The next chapter introduces Chinook, the World Man- Machine Champion in checkers. Chapter 4.3 describes Logistello, program which won the Othello World Champion title in 1997. Chapter 4.4 mentions the two most popular Scrabble programs: Maven and Quackle competing nip and tuck with each other and leaving human players far away. The next chapter presents the latest AI achievements in poker and bridge - games in which machines are almost as good as human players, though there is still some edge on humans’ side. The final chapter is devoted to Go, one of the latest strongholds of human supremacy over machines left in the mind game area.