When Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy it was quite natural to give it a sonorous name. It needed to attract money and talent. It has since become a mainstream subject that seeks to imitate human intelligence. See a recent definition: “Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”

I remember the first steps. It was the late 1950s. I worked in industry. A colleague of mine, two benches away, had the job of recognising and printing out some limited speech consisting of the numbers from one to ten. He talked to an oscilloscope and watched the appearing waveform. He hoped to identify the numbers from the zero crossings on the oscilloscope, ie when the waveform changed sign. One day he told me that the problem had been solved. His machine had been able to recognise all those numbers. “May I try it?” I asked. “By all means,” he said. I tried, and counted up to ten. The machine ignored me. Several other people tried and failed too. As it turned out later, the machine could only work if addressed in a Polish accent. That was a long time ago. Since then software has been commercially available that understands not only those born in this country but also Hungarians, known to be mercilessly massacring the English language. Machines can of course do a lot more nowadays than understand the spoken word. But are they intelligent? Where should our quest for intelligence take us? Games are good candidates. Let us look at a number of them starting with a simple one: Noughts and Crosses.

When Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy it was quite natural to give it a sonorous name. It needed to attract money and talent. It has since become a mainstream subject that seeks to imitate human intelligence. See a recent definition: “Artificial Intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition

This technology includes all the learning techniques (machine learning) and in particular, deep learning. Deep learning builds upon the artificial neuron technology conceived at the end of the 1950’s, as well as on the tremendous computational power we have today to equip computers with a ‘virtual brain’ made of thousands or even millions of neurons capable of learning.