AI Plays Games

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was all the rage in the 1980s. Specifically, companies invested heavily to build expert systems – AI applications that captured the knowledge of acknowledged human experts and made it available to solve narrowly defined types of problems. Thus, expert systems were created to configure complex computer systems and to detect likely credit card fraud. This earlier round of AI was triggered by a series of successful academic expert applications created at Stanford University. Dendral analyzed mass spectra data and identified organic molecules – something that, previously, only a few chemists could do. Another expert systems was called Mycin, and it analyzed potential of meningitis infections. In a series of tests, it was shown that Mycin could analyze meningitis as well as human meningitis experts, and it even did slightly better, since it never overlooked possible drug incompatibility issues. The expert systems developed in the Eighties all followed the general approach followed by Dendral and Mycin.