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Skat thoughts
I’ve been playing Skat, quite a bit of it, actually, thanks to the very swift Xskat implementation running on my phone. The difficulty of Skat is overrated. It’s not that hard. I thought the auction was complicated, but it isn’t. At least against the computer opponents, most of the time you don’t really have to…
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Jonathan Schaeffer and Duplicate Poker
I was scouring the web for interesting Poker news (that’s what I do for living these days) and I bumped into a familiar name. There’s a Man vs Machine Poker Championship coming, where two human Poker pros will play against Polaris, a Poker computer program. In the end of the article I read, they interview…
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Jim’s San Juan
If you like San Juan and have a Mac, go get Jim’s San Juan (zip packet, almost five megs). It’s a very good computer version of the card game. The user interface is very smooth and easy to use. The AI is fairly good, but not superb. I’ve only lost once to any of the…
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One Jump Ahead
This post contains affiliate links to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links are marked with a €.I finished reading One Jump Ahead : Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers, which was rather interesting book. It’s written by Jonathan Schaeffer, who designed Chinook, the first computer program to win a human…
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Games and artificial intelligence
Yesterday I watched a bit of a documentary about Garry Kasparov and how he lost a match to IBM’s Deep Blue. As the story goes, Deep Blue pulled an untypical move in the second game, causing Kasparov to lose. After that, he lost his concentration and failed to win the match. Kasparov, naturally, accused IBM…