Winning ways

RESEARCHERS in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as pattern recognition, learning and planning. They also hold out the tantalising possibility of fame and fortune should the program ever clobber a human champion. Ever since the stunning victory of Deep Blue, a program running on an IBM supercomputer, over Gary Kasparov, then world chess champion, in 1997, it has been clear that computers would dominate that particular game. Today, though, they are pressing the attack on every front.