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Artificial Intelligence Programming
Name: Zain S.
Status: Student
Age: 17
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: Around 2001
Question:
How is artificial intelligence programmed? I have don
some algorithm work with a computer player for checkers, but all it did
was search for good moves. how are computers programmed to actually
learn? please give me any good references on this topic as well.
Replies:
Actually, it sounds like you have made a great start. There are many
different areas of artificial intelligence, and each area of research has
its advantages and disadvantages, and has certain types of problems it does
well in solving.
For strategy and classic board games, approaches like you are using are
quite common and generally good. A little more advanced approach is to use
a decision tree. Basically, at each step all the possible moves are
evaluated, and then the best move is selected. Then the algorithm simulates
the best move for the opponent, and so on until a given depth is reached,
and then the path is evaluated. It is called a decision tree because from
each move, a lot of next moves branch out. After all the moves have been
searched, the next move along the best path is choosen and played.
To make the machine learn, the moves are recorded, and then when the game is
over, it goes back and updates each move with whether the game was won or
lost by making that move.
For example, in a game of tic-tac-toe, you could do this by having a number
for each board position and possible next move. At first everything would
be set to zero. When the computer wanted to make a next move, it would find
the current board position and look at the numbers for each next move. Then
the computer would pick the highest number or randomly choose from those
that are the same and move there. It would also store the board position
and move. At the end of the game, if it was lost, the computer would
subtract one from each move it made, or if it was won, would add one to each
move. The next time it played, it would tend to not make losing moves, and
tend to make winning ones.
Games typically use a strategy for searching for the best moves, like a
decision tree, or simulation rather than a decision at all. For example in
StarCraft, each little character has a fixed set of rules that it will
follow and control how it behaves, and has no real intelligence at all, and
is simply ran as a simulation. The AI players, on the other hand have to
make decisions about what to do with their characters, and come up with a
strategy to beat the human players.
There are many different types of Artificial Intelligence algorithms,
including expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic and more.
An introduction to artificial intelligence can be found on the web at:
http://ai.about.com/compute/ai/library/weekly/aa051899.htm
More stuff can be found on the same site at:
http://ai.about.com/compute/ai/
This site has a few good articles and links to a lot more articles.
I hope this helps,
Eric Tolman
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Update: June 2012
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