[tghw]

When I was in grad school, I was working on general game playing AI. Unfortunately, I was in a "pure logic" research group, founded on the old-school AI principles that believed AI could be derived from deterministic logic.

Of course, this limited the games that we could simulate to purely deterministic games (checkers, chess, go, etc.). Any games that included an aspect of chance required a hack like a "dice player" or a "deck player" that would add the random aspects of the game. Of course, this led to other problems, since the engines would try to calculate the current state of the game based on the "optimal" play of the random player.

This is a much more interesting approach, and I imagine will prove to be far more useful.