From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2004-12-14T03:48:32+09:00
Subject: Re: [NON-SOLUTION] Learning Tic-Tac-Toe (#11)

On Dec 13, 2004, at 12:07 PM, Hans Fugal wrote:

> Ok, I hope I don't become infamous for non-solutions, but I like to 
> share what didn't work because that can be almost as instructive as 
> what did work.

I too ran into road blocks.  I tried to recreate Donald Michie's famous 
"matchbox machine", MENACE, in Ruby.  Unfortunately, i tripped myself 
up with my own cleverness.

I was optimizing the amount of positions the machine had to consider 
(see my earlier message about rotation and mirroring).  My 
implementation was flawed though and failed to shift the weights for 
possible moves accordingly.  This lead my AI to try bogus moves.

There's also a more subtle flaw in my matchbox/bead logic, affecting 
the machines ability to learn from it's mistakes.  I was in the process 
of tracking that down when I began running into the above problem.

Both of these problems are fixable, of course, but I ran out of time 
this weekend.  In the end, I blame myself.  I over complicated it and 
could have kept things easier on myself.  Live and learn, as the saying 
goes.

James Edward Gray II