Foundations of AI and CI in Games. Claude Shannon’s Postulates

Abstract

From the very beginning of Artificial Intelligence, games were one of themain topics of interest and extensive research. The foundations of the field were laid in seminal papers by the giants of AI and general computer science: von Neumann and Morgenstern [333], Shannon [296], Turing [327], Newell, Shaw and Simon [238], Samuel [277, 279], and others. In the 60 years that followed these first investigations, all relevant aspects of machine game playing were developed step by step, ultimately leading to world championship level playing systems. Apart from these top AI/CI achievements there are plenty of other less renown, but relevant research results. Several search methods, smart game representations, sophisticated evaluation functions, and other game related concepts were developed on the way. A selection of these accomplishments is presented in the following two chapters devoted respectively to AI methods and AI playing systems. The reader interested in systematic and exhaustive presentation of AI developments in particular games may be willing to consult overview papers, e.g. [120, 303] for chess or [40, 237] for Go.