Why Study Game Playing?

• Games allow us to experiment with easier versions of real-world situations
• Hostile agents act against our goals
• Games have a finite set of moves
• Games are fairly easy to represent
• Good idea to decide about what to think
• Perfection is unrealistic, must settle for good
• One of the earliest areas of AI
  • Claude Shannon and Alan Turing wrote chess programs in 1950s
• The opponent introduces uncertainty
• The environment may contain uncertainty (backgammon)
• Search space too hard to consider exhaustively
  • Chess has about legal positions
  • Efficient and effective search strategies even more critical
• Games are fun to target!