Teaching computers to play games has been a pursuit and passion for many programmers. Game playing has led to many advances in computing over the years, and the best computerized game players have gained a lot of attention from the general public (think Deep Blue and Watson).

Using the Ricochet Robots board game as an example, let’s talk about what’s involved in teaching a computer to play games. Along the way, we’ll touch on graph search techniques, data representation, algorithms, heuristics, pruning, and optimization.

The slides for this talk are available on SpeakerDeck.

Thanks again to LoneStarRuby for having me speak, and to Confreaks for recording and posting the video.