Samuel's Checkers Program  Arthur Samuel wrote an early (1959)
program that played Checkers at championship level. This program
had several interesting features:    1. The program learned its
heuristic function from experience playing humans and itself.
The heuristic function was a weighted average of several
features (e.g. piece advantage, mobility, control of the
center). Coefficients of features were ``rewarded'' or
``punished'' depending on whether the program won or lost.    2.
If the program wins (or loses), it is difficult to determine
which move(s) were responsible and should be rewarded or
punished. This is called the credit assignment problem .    3.
Low-pass filtering of coefficients was used to smooth out the
effects of unjust rewards and punishments.  Contents   
Page-10    Prev    Next    Page+10    Index