A world-championship-level Othello program

Othello is a recent addition to the collection of games that have been examined within artificial intelligence. Advances have been rapid, yielding programs that have reached the level of world-championship play. This article describes the current champion Othello program, iago. The work described here includes: (1) a task analysis of Othello; (2) the implementation of a program based on this analysis and state-of-the-art AI game-playing techniques; and (3) an evaluation of the program's performance through games played against other programs and comparisons with expert human play.