less-interesting pages

These are good enough to mention, but not good enough for me to call "interesting".

Some of them are commercial games; they may have fascinating AI, but the publishers are usually reluctant to release details. Seek more information at Steven Woodcock's current and upcoming games page.

games

Battlecruiser: 3000AD
A complex commercial game with a neural-net based AI which controls many details of game play.

Coins Neural Game
Play a simple guess-your-opponent's-move game on this web page. The sparse implementation is by Geert Jan Bex. Two neural networks are included in the choices of opponents.

Creatures
A commercial artificial life game in which you breed "creatures" which are controlled by neural networks.

Dynamic Gin
A shareware gin rummy program which adapts to its opponent while it is playing, from CyberSym Technologies. The web page has no technical information that I found, but the company wrote to me that the learning engine "is (primarily) a temporal difference neural net." They say the play is strong but not top-level, partly because they wanted fast response even on older computers.

Galapagos
A commercial game in which you have some control over the environment of a "synthetic organism", Mendel, which can learn on its own. It is a puzzle game in which one of the puzzles is to teach Mendel how to behave the way you prefer.

Last One Loses
A simple game in which the computer opponent learns to play perfectly by rote learning. You can download the Visual Basic program.

Queenbee
Jack van Rijswijck
A hex program which is planning to use unspecified machine learning methods.

machine learning opportunities

Diplomacy Programming Project
A project to write a Diplomacy AI. Diplomacy is a game that could benefit from machine learning but, as far as I can tell, doesn't yet. Also see The Diplomatic Pouch, which has a number of articles about the DPP.

Xconq
A free strategic wargame framework in which game designers can create a wide variety new games on a hex board, using a declarative game design language. As an example of the flexibility, the xconq distribution includes not only the usual WWII-like games, but also a Godzilla-Tokyo scenario. It supports plug-in AI modules; the one included AI can play all xconq games, though weakly. Writing a smarter AI would be a good metagame task. There are problems: The human interface is clumsy. The AI interface is undocumented.