General "Did you Know?"s

[retrolinkx]

Get your reading glasses on and hear the tale of how an 80's AI developed a completely novel strategy to curbstomp a bunch of nerds so hard they had to change the rules of the game.

http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/euris...nd-its-own

tl;dr

An AI wins a game called "Traveller" in 1981 which was a fleet fighting game in space. You build you fleet to fight other fleets and are limited by a budget. Guy builds an AI to run millions of tests to work out what was the best fleet to build with the money you have. Eventually learns having 100+ ships with the perfect amount of defense would best all the other ships, and even had a fail safe in the form of a small lifeboat that would damage other ships and not be damaged itself since enemy ships could not hit something that small. It even had the smarts to build another ship that would counter enemy "lifeboats" if the enemy attempted to copy it's strategy.

AI wins the tournament, tournament guys change rules to counter him, wins the next tournament and then is politely asked not to compete again or they will cancel all other tournaments.