A Parisian researcher has created a computer system that can learn the rules of games by watching you play — and then beat you at it.

ukasz Kaiser, a cross-disciplinary researcher at the Paris Diderot University who has a love for logic, games, and computer algorithms, has created software that uses computer vision to learn the rules of five board games: Breakthrough, Connect 4, Gomoku, Tic-tac-toe, and Pawn Whopping [does anyone know what this game is?]. Kaiser records videos of winning games, losing games, and illegal moves — and then feeds them into the system.



From these videos, the software strips out superfluous features, such as human hands, and focuses on the position of the games’ tokens (all five games are grid-based). From these positions (winning positions, losing positions, and illegal positions), the software works out the rules of the game. These rules are expressed as logical formulae, such as ˆƒx1Q(x1) ˆ§ ˆƒx0(C(x1,x0) ˆ§ x0 = e1)

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