Ian Frank – författare

This book updates the thesis I produced for my PhD at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Edinburgh, correcting errors, and improving some of the formatting and readability. Since the original work was completed (early 1996), research has progressed. Most notably, the public profile of AI and game-playing has reached new heights with the feats of the chess computer DEEPER BLUE (which surely uses AI, no matter what IBM would have us believe). Although less heralded, the ability of computers to play Bridge (the main example domain in this book) has also increased. In July of 1997 a world championship for computer Bridge programs was hosted by the American Contract Bridge League in Albuquerque, New Mex­ ico. This contest was won by a program called Bridge Baron, produced by Great Game Products. Bridge Baron incorporates knowledge-based planning techniques developed by Stephen Smith and Dana Nau [1, 2]. Progress has also been made on the contrasting, more brute-force, approach of sampling the possible card distributions. In particular, Matt Ginsberg has developed a fast double-dummy solver based on partition search [3]. Ginsberg''s program fared poorly in the 1997 Bridge championships, but Ginsberg himself reports very promising results [4] on a hard set of complete Bridge deals taken from the Bridge tutoring program Bridge Master.

This book updates the thesis I produced for my PhD at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Edinburgh, correcting errors, and improving some of the formatting and readability. Since the original work was completed (early 1996), research has progressed. Most notably, the public profile of AI and game-playing has reached new heights with the feats of the chess computer DEEPER BLUE (which surely uses AI, no matter what IBM would have us believe). Although less heralded, the ability of computers to play Bridge (the main example domain in this book) has also increased. In July of 1997 a world championship for computer Bridge programs was hosted by the American Contract Bridge League in Albuquerque, New Mex­ ico. This contest was won by a program called Bridge Baron, produced by Great Game Products. Bridge Baron incorporates knowledge-based planning techniques developed by Stephen Smith and Dana Nau [1, 2]. Progress has also been made on the contrasting, more brute-force, approach of sampling the possible card distributions. In particular, Matt Ginsberg has developed a fast double-dummy solver based on partition search [3]. Ginsberg's program fared poorly in the 1997 Bridge championships, but Ginsberg himself reports very promising results [4] on a hard set of complete Bridge deals taken from the Bridge tutoring program Bridge Master.

This book contains the papers presented at CG2000 - the Second International ConferenceonComputersandGames-heldattheCURREACCenterinHa- matsu, Japan, on October 26-28, 2000. The CG conferences provide an international forum for researchers working on any aspect of computers and games to meet and exchange information on the latest research. CG2000 was attended by 80 people from over a dozen di?erent countries, thus building on the success of the inaugural Computers and Games conference, held in 1998. The third conference in the series is scheduled to take place alongside the AAAI conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in 2002. The interests of the conference attendees and organizers cover all issues related togame-playing;forinstance,theimplementationandperformanceofprograms, new theoretical developments in game-related research, general scienti?c cont- butions produced by the study of games, social aspects of computer games, cognitive research on how humans play games, and issues related to networked games. This book contains all the new developments presented at CG2000. The CG2000 technical program consisted of 23 presentations of accepted papers and apanelsession.InadditiontherewereinvitedtalksbyMichaelLittmanofAT&T Labs, Kei-ichi Tainaka of Shizuoka University, and Nob Yoshigahara, noted - ventor, collector, and popularizer of puzzles.The conference was preceded by an informal workshop on October 26, 2000.