Computer See, Computer Win

Category: Science & Technology
Posted: July 10, 2012 11:03AM
Author: Guest_Jim_*

About one year ago, researchers at MIT demonstrated an AI program that could read the manual for a game to learn how to play but who has time to read a game's manual? Now a separated research team has created a program that can learn to play a game by watching humans play it first (PDF of paper).

Image-processing tools allow the software to identify changes to a game board and that information it then uses to determine the legal moves of the game as well as what a the winning condition is. Once it has determined how to play and win the game, it examines every possible move, to determine which will most likely lead to a victory, even when up against an experienced human player.

Sadly this software is still fairly simple as it cannot recognize victories that are linked to movement, such as a King being unable to move in checkmate. Simpler games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect 4 however can be successfully analyzed by the machine, and no doubt the researchers will strive to enable to program to learn Chess.

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