Although not as much of a buzzword as “Big Data”, “Machine Learning” is definitely en vogue. To be honest, the phrase sounds much more exotic than the actual technique! Nonetheless, the area of artificial intelligence interests me so I decided…
N-Queens Part 2: More Algorithms
Last time we were considering the following n-queens board with a current heuristic cost of 5:By making just one move, the best decision would be to move the second queen to the space marked 2. However, to find that move,…
N-Queens Part 1: Steepest Hill Climbing
The n-queens problem was first invented in the mid 1800s as a puzzle for people to solve in their spare time, but now serves as a good tool for discussing computer search algorithms. In chess, a queen is the only…
How quickly can a computer learn Tic Tac Toe?
In my post last week, I discussed my Java implementation of the MENACE Tic Tac Toe machine. I also mentioned how playing against the MENACE manually is simply too time consuming. And since all programmers are lazy, I of course…
Java Tic Tac Toe – MENACE
If you’ve ever played Tic Tac Toe, you know that the game gets boring after only a few rounds. The reason for this is because every possible board state has an optimal play. Furthermore, these optimal plays are simple enough…