Selman quoted in ComputerWorld

Bart Selman was featured in the December 5, 2005, issue of ComputerWorld. The article, Getting Real: Analyzing Dynamics That Can Choke Supercomputers, leads with an example that illustrates a point the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is trying to make: computers will never be able to exhaustively examine the possible outcomes of complex activities, any more than a roomful of monkeys with typewriters would ever be able to re-create the works of Shakespeare.

The article highlights work done by Selman, Robert Constable, Carla Gomes, Mark Bickford, and Christoph Kreitz. The team has developed chess-playing software that extends the concept of single-agent reasoning to multiagent scenarios that include one or more opposing forces.

In the article, Selman explained that the Cornell chess program emulates a grandmaster.

"It might exploit certain strategies, then find they are not successful. It learns from that and adds that to its knowledge base. It gets better the more games it plays, even during a single game," Selman explains. It develops a conceptual view of the board and seeks out overall positions that will give it strength.

By applying these learning techniques and other improvements over traditional reasoning tools, Selman indicated that his team has so far achieved a 109 speed improvement over those tools.

For the complete article, visit http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,106722,00.html.