A Game-centric Approach to Teaching Artificial Intelligence

Marc Pouly, Thomas Koller, Ruedi Arnold

2019

Abstract

Man vs. machine competitions have always been attracting much public attention and the famous defeats of human champions in chess, Jeopardy!, Go or poker undoubtedly mark important milestones in the history of artificial intelligence. In this article we reflect on our experiences with a game-centric approach to teaching artificial intelligence that follows the historical development of algorithms by popping the hood of these champion bots. Moreover, we made available a server infrastructure for playing card games in perfect information and imperfect information playing mode, where students can evaluate their implementations of increasingly sophisticated game-playing algorithms in weekly online competitions, i.e. from rule-based systems to exhaustive and heuristic search in game trees to deep learning enhanced Monte Carlo methods and reinforcement learning completely freed of human domain knowledge. The evaluation of this particular course setting revealed enthusiastic feedback not only from students but also from the university authority. What started as an experiment became part of the standard computer science curriculum after just one implementation.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pouly M., Koller T. and Arnold R. (2019). A Game-centric Approach to Teaching Artificial Intelligence.In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-367-4, pages 398-404. DOI: 10.5220/0007745203980404

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu19,
author={Marc Pouly and Thomas Koller and Ruedi Arnold},
title={A Game-centric Approach to Teaching Artificial Intelligence},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2019},
pages={398-404},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007745203980404},
isbn={978-989-758-367-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - A Game-centric Approach to Teaching Artificial Intelligence
SN - 978-989-758-367-4
AU - Pouly M.
AU - Koller T.
AU - Arnold R.
PY - 2019
SP - 398
EP - 404
DO - 10.5220/0007745203980404