May 11, 1997, was a watershed moment in the history of artificial intelligence (AI): the IBM supercomputer chess engine, Deep Blue, beat the world Chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It was the first time a machine had triumphed over a human player in a Chess tournament. Fast forward 19 years to May 9, 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the world Go champion Lee Sedol. AI again stole the spotlight and generated a media frenzy. This time, a new type of AI algorithm, namely machine learning (ML) was the driving force behind the game strategies. What exactly is ML? How is it related to AI? Why is deep learning (DL) so popular these days? This book explains how traditional rule-based AI and ML work and how they can be implemented in everyday games such as Last Coin standing, Tic Tac Toe, or Connect Four. Game rules in these three games are easy to implement. As a result, readers will learn rule-based AI, deep reinforcement learning, and more importantly, how to combine the two to create powerful
