Game Playing:

We have now dispensed with the necessary background material for AI problem solving techniques, and we just considered to looking at particular types of problems which have been addressed using "AI" techniques. The first kind of problem we'll look at is getting an agent to compete, it may be against a human or another artificial agent. This area has been exceptionally well researched over the last 50 years. Definitely some of the first chess programs were written by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and other fore-fathers of modern computing. We just have mostly one lecture to look at this topic, so we'll hamper ourselves to looking at two person games such as chess played by software agents. If you are concerned in games involving more teamwork and , or robotics, then a good place to begin would be with the Robo Cup project,5.1 MinMax Search Parents often get two children to share a cake fairly by asking one to cut the cake and the other to choose which half they want to eat. In fact in this two player cake-scoffing game, there is only one move like cutting the cake, other is player one soon learns that if he wants to maximize the amount of cake he gets, he had superior cut the cake into the same halves, this means that his opponent is going to try and minimize the cake that player 1 gets by choosing the biggest half for herself.

Suppose we have a two player game where the winner scores a positive number at the end, so that the loser scores is nothing. In board games like chess, the score is mostly just 1 for a win and 0 for a loss. In other games such as poker, however, one player wins the cash in prize amount that the other player loses. These are called zero-sum games, this means that whenever you add one player's winnings to the other player's loss, the sum is zero.