Tomorrow night is the next F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group at SkillsMatter in London! And it promises to be a really fantastic event, with a talk using F# to program the AI engine of a truly beautiful game.
 
  Details: Thursday, March 3, 6:30pm, The Skills Matter eXchange, 116-120 Goswell Road London
 
David Stern will talking about the XBox Live Arcade Game "The Path Of Go". David is the author of the AI engine used in the game, written in F#:
.
"We used F# to program the AI. F# lets you focus more on the problem domain and less on programming itself."”
 .
 
From the XBLA description of the game:
 
Discover the ancient board game of Go and take your Avatar on an unexpected HD adventure full of challenge! Learn the basics and test your abilities using cutting-edge AI from Microsoft Research. Pit your skills against the world on Xbox LIVE. The ultimate Go experience for players of all skill levels: Dare you walk The Path of Go?
 
The Path Of Go was developed at Microsoft Research:
 
Microsoft Research has launched The Path of Go, an Xbox Live Arcade game based on ‘Go’, the ancient Chinese board game. Go is a strategy game that is at least 2,500 years old and originated from Ancient China. Although it’s not known exactly when the game was invented, by the 3rd century BC it was already a popular pastime. The game is played by two players who take turns placing black and white stones on the vacant intersections of a grid. The objective of the game is to control a larger portion of the board than the opponent. It is a game that takes minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. Go is very challenging to program for a broad audience. It requires an extremely intricate artificial intelligence (AI) in order to make it a challenging gaming experience.
 
Others who worked on it include Markus Jost (who is responsible for the awesome visuals, written using C#), Joaquin Quinoñero Candela, Thore Graepel and Ralf Herbrich.
 
 You can also find an interview with Joaquin as the second half of the really fun F# the Coffee Maker video on YouTube!