I’ve always found artificial intelligence interesting.

While playing first-person-shooter games, I would increase the difficulty level against bots until they were almost super-human in their abilities and speed.

I found that humans were easier to play after I honed my skills on bots.

AI is what powers video game opponents on single player-mode. It’s what allows us to play bridge games online. It also stops mankind from having to look insane by playing chess (and other games) against themselves.

Bots are important things.

Bridge bots are just as important, and I think they can teach us a lot about more than just bridge.

Here are 3 reasons why bridge bots are important.

1. Bots are excellent for practice.

I remember coming into trading card games with no neighbourhood opponents who gave a darn to play. If it weren’t for bots, it might have taken several more years before I discovered how great TCGs can be.

Bots are always available to play, and getting better at it.

The more bot-driven games you play, the more you learn about strategy and the game in question.

2. Bots can be inspiring.

I imagine that many great programmers have had their start by tinkering with bots, algorithms, and what they can do.

I’ve read the study on GIB several times (and will several more times after this). I’m not as experience on code as I would like to be, but I like stepping back and taking a look at how game bots are put together.

Have you ever been inspired by a bot?

An interest in AI studies might just kick off with questions about how video games and their characters think.

3. Bots boost online safety measures.

The development of better gaming bots has a lot to do with online safety. Bots are collections of code at their core, and the more people learn about how they work, the more these skills can be applied elsewhere on the internet.

Card bots, in some cases, work with information the AI cannot explicitly see. The bot has to use other ways to calculate what this information could be.

What this means boiled down to a sentence is that plenty of information on the internet is technically unseen, but can be calculated  Security threats (or libraries of illegal information) is unseen to the average bot. But it can be calculated just the same way.

The smarter bots get, the better other bots might be at spotting security threats before they become threatening.

What have you learned from playing against bots?