🚀 go-pugleaf

> Samuels (Samuelson?) had a checker program in the mid-fifties which ran
> on an IBM 704, I think. It played a quite good game, they said. It had
> an adaptive evaluation function so that it was self improving. Check
> the literature.

The program you refer to dates through the sixties.  It had, as far as I
recall, a learning component, but used the same evaluation function for its
estimate of its opponent's estimate of a position as it did for its own
estimate of a position, and hence was not really "adaptive". (A truly adaptive
system would maintain two evaluation functions -- one reflecting its own
strategy, the other its estimate of its opponent's strategy.  It would
use predictive-corrective methods to continuosly modify its estimate of its
opponent's strategy, and then adapt its own strategy to this.)

Talking of game-playing programs, Hans Berliner at CMU had a backgammon
program in the late '70s - early '80s that beat the then world champion
pretty convincingly.  But I guess that doesn't really belong here ...
-- 
Saumya Debray
SUNY at Stony Brook

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