State of the Art in Computer Games.docVIP

State of the Art in Computer Games: Challenges and Solutions Aleksandr Shnayderman CIS 718 Expert Systems Introduction Artificial Intelligence or AI is the prominent area of research in today’s computer science. Artificial Intelligence has as its goal solution of problems which can not be solved by traditional programming or when a typical solution takes unacceptably too long to compute. Artificial Intelligence usually aims at finding the best possible solution without considering all possible solutions. While trying to model situations which would require intelligence researchers frequently turn to games. “Games are ideal domains for exploring the capabilities of computational intelligence. The rules are fixed, the scope of the problem is constrained, and the interactions of the players are well defined. Contrast the game world with the real world - the game of life - where the rules often change, the scope of the problem is almost limitless, and the participants interact in an infinite number of ways. Games can be a microcosm of the real world (for example, the role of game theory in economics, social interaction, and animal behavior), and successfully achieving high computer performance in a nontrivial game can be a stepping stone toward solving more challenging real-world problems.” [1] Today computer programs have been written to play a multitude of games. Some of these games like chess and checkers have been around for thousands of years. Others like poker and bridge are very young by comparison. In either case these games have well defined small and simple set of rules while at the same time allowing for finite yet very large number of situations that can arise during game play. This survey will provide a description of several games used in AI research. For some of them a “better than any human” player program has been written while for others best playing programs barely qualify as rookies. There will be a brief description of each game and its rules i