Games: That Computers (and People) Play

Three examples are presented that demonstrate technology being used to play games. The first is from the late 1700s – a chess machine named The Turk that defeated well-known players. The second is from the 1960s – a program named Eliza that convincingly played the role of a psychotherapist. Finally, from the late 1990s, a program named Proverb was able to solve crossword puzzles. All three examples are illusions of intelligent machines. The “tricks” are explained, and the reader can see there is no intelligence, at least according to human standards. Because of their simplicity relative to the complexity of the real world, games have been a popular choice for exploring the field of artificial intelligence (AI). As this chapter discusses and the rest of this book demonstrates, the field of AI achieves its results using non-human counterintuitive methods. AI is really SI – superficial intelligence.