We present an experimental comparison of the efficiency of three General Game Playing systems in their current versions: Regular Boardgames (RBG 1.0), Ludii~0.3.0, and a Game Description Language (GDL) propnet. We show that in general, RBG is currently the fastest GGP system. For example, for chess, we demonstrate that RBG is about 37 times faster than Ludii, and Ludii is about 3 times slower than a GDL propnet. Referring to the recent comparison [An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG, CoG 2019], we show evidences that the benchmark presented there contains a number of significant flaws that lead to wrong conclusions.

Overwrought love letters began turning up on the notice board at the University of Manchester's computer lab in August, 1953. Dripping with lustful vocabulary, they were all variations on a basic syntactic template: "YOU ARE MY [adjective] [noun]. And the signatory was always the same: "M.U.C.," for the Manchester University computer, a Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first general-purpose and commercially available machine of its kind. But the real author of the letters (in the first instance, anyway) was Christopher Strachey, a pioneering programmer. As he confessed in an article the following year, "There are many obvious imperfections in this scheme (indeed very little thought went into its devising), and the fact that the vocabulary was largely based on Roget's Thesaurus lends a very peculiar flavor to the results." For Strachey, though, the interesting thing was how a simple setup, using only about seventy base words, could produce a combinatorial explosion of results--on the order of three hundred billion different letters. The lovelorn user could run the program over and over until his fingers seized up, and never see the same letter twice. Strachey was something of an outlier, according to Martin Campbell-Kelly, a historian of computing at the University of Warwick. While scientists and mathematicians of the day typically used computers strictly for numerical calculations, like analyzing weapons trajectories or seeking prime factors of huge numbers, his fascination was with non-numerical computations--what soon became known as artificial intelligence. "Strachey grabbed hold of that much more than anybody else," Campbell-Kelly told me. The results were not always lovey-dovey. Besides training the Mark 1 to churn out billets-doux, he also taught it to play checkers ("draughts," in British parlance). If M.U.C.'s opponent made too many mistakes, it would get crotchety and print out a reprimand: "I refuse to waste any more time.

The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved". Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago. The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.

It has taken more than 18 years, and hundreds of computers to crunch numbers through the night, but yesterday Jonathan Schaefer declared his job done: he had written the world's first program that was unbeatable at the game of draughts. Chinook, as the program is known, can calculate a winning response to any move made by its opponent. The worst result it can ever have is a draw, according to Dr Schaefer, an expert in artificial intelligence, working at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. The game of draughts, played on a board with eight by eight squares, is the most complicated game ever solved thanks to artificial intelligence. The number of possible positions in a game makes it one million times more complex than Connect Four.

There are moments that live on in business history. One of them is the cry: "Mr Watson come here, I want to see you," spoken by Alexander Graham Bell back in 1876, in the world's first telephone conversation. Another significant moment was the day in 1997 when the IBM computer called Deep Blue beat the then world champion Gary Kasparov at chess. And then another IBM moment in 2011 when an even more intelligent computer called Watson -after the IBM founder Thomas Watson and his IBM chief executive son Thomas - won the TV game Jeopardy against human competition. These last two IBM contests demonstrate - we're told - big advances in machine intelligence.