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14 - Game Playing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Nils J. Nilsson
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Summary

I have already mentioned attempts to program computers to play borad games, such as chess and checkers. The most successful of these was Arthur Samuel's checker-playing program. In 1967, Samuel published a paper describing an improved version of his program. He had refined the program's search procedure and incorporated better “book-learning” capabilities, and instead of calculating the estimated value of a position by adding up weighted feature values, he used hierarchically organized tables. According to Richard Sutton, “This version learned to play much better than the 1959 program, though still not at a master level.”

Between 1959 and 1962, a group of MIT students, advised by John McCarthy, developed a chess-playing program. It was based on earlier programs for the IBM 704 written by McCarthy. One of the group members, Alan Kotok (1941–2006) described the program in his MIT bachelor's thesis. The program was written in a combination of FORTRAN and machine (assembly) code and ran on the IBM 7090 computer at MIT. It used the alpha–beta procedure (as discussed earlier) to avoid generating branches of the search tree that could be eliminated without altering the final result. Kotok claimed that his program did not complete any games but “played four long game fragments in which it played chess comparable to an amateur with about 100 games experience…. Most of the machine's moves are neither brilliant nor stupid. It must be admitted that it occasionally blunders.” When McCarthy moved to Stanford, he took the program along with him and continued to work on it.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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  • Game Playing
  • Nils J. Nilsson
  • Book: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence
  • Online publication: 05 August 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819346.017
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  • Game Playing
  • Nils J. Nilsson
  • Book: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence
  • Online publication: 05 August 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819346.017
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Game Playing
  • Nils J. Nilsson
  • Book: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence
  • Online publication: 05 August 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819346.017
Available formats
×