Status of AI Game Players

• Tic Tac Toe
  Tied for best player in world (with every human over age 12)
• Othello
  Computer better than any human, human champions now refuse to play computer
• Scrabble
  Maven beat world champions Joel Sherman and Matt Graham
• Backgammon
  TD-Gammon plays near level of world's strongest grandmasters
  Uses a three-ply search, neural network with 160 hidden units
  Search is expensive in backgammon, because all possible dice rolls must be considered
• Bridge
  Gib is ranked among top players in the world
  
• Poker
  Pokie plays at strong intermediate level
• Checkers
  Chinook ended 40-year reign of human champion Marion Tinsley in 1994
  Used endgame database for all positions involving 8 or fewer pieces on the board, positions
• Chess
  Deep Blue beat human champion Gary Kasparov in six-game match in 1997
  Deep Blue searches 200M positions/second
  Searches up to 40 ply
  Now looking at other applications (molecular dynamics, drug synthesis, etc.) Deep Junior match with Kasparov ends in tie
  
• Go
  Human champions refuse to compete against computers, which are not yet at a strong level
  The branching factor is greater than 300