A Game-centric Approach to Teaching Artificial Intelligence

Man vs. machine competitions have always been attracting much public attention and the famous defeats of human champions in chess, Jeopardy!, Go or poker undoubtedly mark important milestones in the history of artificial intelligence. In this article we reflect on our experiences with a game-centric approach to teaching artificial intelligence that follows the historical development of algorithms by popping the hood of these champion bots. Moreover, we made available a server infrastructure for playing card games in perfect information and imperfect information playing mode, where students can evaluate their implementations of increasingly sophisticated game-playing algorithms in weekly online competitions, i.e. from rule-based systems to exhaustive and heuristic search in game trees to deep learning enhanced Monte Carlo methods and reinforcement learning completely freed of human domain knowledge. The evaluation of this particular course setting revealed enthusiastic feedback not only from students but also from the university authority. What started as an experiment became part of the standard computer science curriculum after just one implementation.