A.I.

A.I. was one of the first pieces of educational software to explore pattern recognition and heuristic learning at a grade school level.

The premise of A.I. is that there is a simple go-like game board that players take turns placing pieces on until one manages to play a winning combination. The human player decides on the rules of the game first (i.e. four in a row horizontally wins) and then the A.I. learns the rules by playing the game and asking questions such as "have I won with this move?" Advanced players can then examine the routines that the AI used to study the rules and program in their own instructions for evaluating games. Although the package overplays the intelligence of the Apple II slightly, A.I. was still a surprisingly sophisticated set of learning algorithms for 1987.