Computers become an integral part of our life. Can a computer replace a man everywhere or the man will always be more intelligent than the iron and silicon?

Speech recognition and simulation, medical diagnostics and expert systems are just some fields that Artificial Intelligence attempts to approach. And games... People like to play games against computers. All kinds of simulators, role playing games, card games, chess and checkers.

In my lecture I will give a short theoretical introduction to the Artificial Intelligence and discuss some CPAN modules implementing AI games and chat systems.

I will show my implementation of the Checkers game in Perl and we will play a bit against the computer. This game will serve us an example to describe the min-max algorithm and other AI techniques used in almost all turn based games.

The lecture is intended to be instructive and entertaining for anyone with a basic computer science background.