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SUMMARY:Computer Othello - Sanjoy Mahajan
DTSTART:20050503T130000Z
DTEND:20050503T140000Z
UID:TALK4339@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Phil Cowans
DESCRIPTION:Many years ago Kai-Fu Lee and I wrote BILL\, a world-champsion
 ship-level Othello program (now released as free software).  It had an aut
 omatically trained nonlinear evaluation function with sophisticated unders
 tanding of edge play\; it used alpha-beta searching in the middle-game\; a
 nd it performed exact searches in the endgame.  I will describe BILL's sea
 rch algorithms and evaluation function\; discuss why Othello\, in contrast
  to chess or Go\, is much easier for computers than for humans\; and show 
 a few examples from BILL's games.\n
LOCATION:Ryle Seminar Room\, Cavendish Laboratory
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