Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The subject of this paper is the role of transferable commonsense principles in the acquisition of gameplaying expertise. W e argue that individuals skilled in a domain develop expertise because they know and apply these principles, and that most game-playing programs do not play like people. The paper describes Hoyle, a model of an expert game player that relies on the use of commonsense principles, limited memory, and useful knowledge to learn to play two-person, perfect information finite-board games expertly. W e then describe an experiment in which human subjects played three such games against a computer expert. After playing these games, the subjects evaluated Hoyle's game-playing principles in the context of their own behavior Verbal protocols and subjects' evaluations revealed considerable overlap between the principles preferred by our subjects and those preferred by Hoyle. Using learning time as a measure of difficulty, the subjects' performance and Hoyle's performance ordered the three games identically. This experiment also revealed differences in the use of gameplaying principles between skilled and unskilled players: skilled players judged the game-playing principles to be more effective than did unskilled players, skilled players used several different principles while unskilled players relied on one principle, and skilled players anticipated their opponent's moves while unskilled players merely reacted.