Game Playing: The Next Moves

Abstract

Computer programs now play many board games as well or better than the most expert humans. Human players, however, learn, plan, allocate resources, and integrate mul-tiple streams of knowledge. This paper highlights recent achievements in game playing, describes some cogni-tively-oriented work, and poses three related challenge problems for the AI community. Game Playing as a Domain Work on games has had several traditional justifications. Given unambiguous rules, playing a game to win is a well-defined problem. A game’s rules create artificial world states whose granularity is explicit. There is an ini-tial state, a state space with clear transitions, and a set of readily describable goal states. Without intervening in-