Reddit reviews Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion

It does in the sense that, very often, for video games the goal isn't to create artificial intelligence, but simulate human player behavior. Usually CPU cycles are reserved for graphics, physics, etc. As GPU's get more powerful and graphics start to plateau, I think you could do some pretty deep AI. But I'd point out I think NN is the wrong form of AI implementation (ironically enough a major feature of a hobby project game of mine is sophisticated AI; but not learning AI).

The silly strategies the bot developed, btw, where basically randomly firing and moving towards and away from other players. Because a NN doesn't have short-term memory, the AI couldn't take stock of the level and learn spawn locations, ambush locations, etc. It had to come up with a general strategy to apply in any situation. It also had no ability to assess threat, though it would prioritize targets.

Furthermore Neuralbot used genetic algorithms and generational death using kill-count as a fitness score. There's a number of issues with that as well. Imagine a bot that was sophisticated enough to dodge all incoming attacks. That is definitely worth breeding with the highest kill count. But using the GA and fitness approach would lead to its death. So you need to come up with some better fitness score, and a better breeding program. Which is basically what I tried to do when I was a teenager and I wanted to learn this stuff. But running multiple Quake2 servers on my crappy PC didn't really work out.

Anyone it's an interesting topic, thanks for bringing it up.

Edit: And BTW none of this is meant to be condescending to Neuralbot. I nearly shit myself when I first started playing with it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever! And it really did inspire me to push some of my programming skills. I keep the site bookmarked for nostalgia purposes. But as I got further into AI I became more disenchanted with it. The book Behind Deep Blue really put me off to it. There's still a lot of research to be done in the field that is wayyyyyy beyond me.

This doesn't match up with the account in "Behind Deep Blue." http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/0691118183

That book describes the move search algorithms in detail and explains that because there was extra time, Deep Blue searched some non-profitable portions of the game tree and found an even better move. Kasparov had come to assume that computers always pruned the game tree based on maximum profitability of move and shouldn't have made that move.

Sounds like a pile of B.S.

I encourage reading http://amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/0691118183 (if you don't want to purchase it, visit a library and request it).