Last year the machines finally beat us at our own game. IBM’s megacomputer, Watson, creamed the hominid competition at the quirky, punny, idiosyncratic Jeopardy! This contest, calling on such skills as language, grammar, and wordplay, is among the most human of games—much more so than the mathematical system of chess, which IBM’s Deep Blue mastered in the 1990s. Does that make Jeopardy! a machine’s greatest gaming challenge? Not quite, says ai (artificial intelligence) researcher and computer science professor Bart Massey of Portland State University in Oregon. Checkers, chess, Scrabble, bridge, backgammon, poker, Stratego, and more—software designers are scrambling to create systems to crack each one. The history of competitive computers is the history of overestimating the rise of the machines and underestimating the strength of the human brain. Watson may have triumphed, but computers still lag behind the best human players in many of our favorite games.
The Grid: Where Computers Reign
Tic-tac-toe and Connect Four have small, two-dimensional playing areas, and the rules are simple: Players take turns in an attempt to place three or four marks in a row, while preventing an opponent from doing the same. This simplicity makes these kids’ games, which humans tend to tire of as they grow older. But they are perfect for computers.
There’s no hidden info or luck involved in tic-tac-toe, Massey writes in his notes on AI and games. Most importantly, a computer can do what a child cannot: simulate every possible outcome and choose the perfect move. As a result, tic-tac-toe and Connect Four fall into the category of solved games. Computers play them perfectly. You lose.
But what happens when the board gets bigger and the rules more complex?
