There is a signup schedule for this event.

Speaker Nam

e/Affiliation: David Fogel/Natural Selection Inc.

Date/Time: Thursd

ay September 7 2006 at 3:30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host:
Risto Miikkulainen

Talk Title: Behind the Scenes with Blondie24: Ev

olving Intelligence in Checkers and Chess

Talk Abstract:
Blondie2

4 is a self-learning checks program that taught itself
to play at the le

vel of human experts. Starting with only
rudimentary information about t

he location number and types
of checkers pieces on the board Blondie2

4 learned to play well
enough to be ranked in the top 500 of 120 000 che

ckers players
registered at Microsoft''s zone.com. The program uses a si

mple
evolutionary algorithm to optimize neural networks as board
eval

uators. Any sophisticated features used to interpret the
positions of pi

eces were invented within the neural network.
Furthermore the evolving

neural networks were not told whether
they won lost or drew any specif

ic game; instead the only
feedback they received was a point score ass

ociated with an
overall result of playing a random number of games. In s

o
doing the line of research addressed two fundamental issues
raised
by Arthur Samuel and Allen Newell over three decades
ago: Can a compute

r invent features in checkers and can a
computer learn how play without

receiving explicit credit
assignment? A similar process has also been ap

plied to chess
(Blondie25). Starting with an open source program rated a

bout
1800 (Class A) the evolved program has demonstrated
grandmaster

-level performance. The lecture will provide
motivation and technical d

etails for this research as well as
offer materials not found in any te

chnical or book treatments
of the development. Attendees will be able t

o challenge
Blondie to a game if they like.

Speaker Bio:
Dr.

David Fogel is chief executive officer of Natural
Selection Inc. in La

Jolla California. Dr. Fogel has over 200
technical publications and 6 b

ooks including Blondie24:
Playing at the Edge of AI (Morgan Kaufmann 2

002) and How to
Solve It: Modern Heuristics (with Zbigniew Michalewicz

2nd
ed. Springer 2005 translated into Chinese and Polish). Among
ma

ny leadership roles Dr. Fogel was the founding
editor-in-chief of the I

EEE Transactions on Evolutionary
Computation (1996-2002) general chairm

an for the 2002 IEEE
World Congress on Computational Intelligence and w

ill chair
the upcoming 2007 IEEE Symposium Series in Computational
In

telligence to be held April 1-5 2007 in Honolulu Hawaii. He
was electe

d a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999 and received the 2004
IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu

Technical Field Award. He was elected
president-elect of the IEEE Comput

ational Intelligence Society
for 2007.