Public Lecture at the CAIMS 2016 Annual Meeting: Michael Bowling

Games are everywhere. We play games to entertain ourselves, motivate ourselves, and educate ourselves. This is particularly true of children, where games are educational tools that both encourage and evaluate mastery of many mental skills. What about our computers? As they get smarter, with ever more powerful artificial intelligence, games can serve the same purpose for our computers as they do for our children. In this talk, I will show what happens when computers play games. What games are they good at? What games do they just not get? And what does that tell us about our computers? And ourselves?