Summary
If you're the kind of reader who's in it for the pictures, you may have found this chapter challenging. An important skill of a computer programmer is to describe nonvisual things, like thought, in concrete steps that a computer can easily digest. But first you, as a human, have to properly digest them!
By using the example of a fairly simple game like Tic Tac Toe, you've walked half a block in the shoes of the computer scientists who programmed a computer to defeat the world's best chess player at his, and humankind's, own game.
In this chapter, you:
Learned to break a strategy game down into its core elements
Explored game trees, and how they can be used to map out all of the branching positions possible in a strategy game
Prioritized a list of strategic options to create a preferred plan of attack.
Used the
||(or) operator to build more sophisticated conditional statementsDiscovered how to create the illusion of thought by adding pauses in the computer's actions, and by choosing randomly...
