Michael Buro is a Canadian AI Researcher and the creator of the Skat-playing computer program Kermit, as well as the Othello-playing computer program

Logistello Logistello is a computer program that plays the game Othello, also known as Reversi. Logistello was written by Michael Buro and is regarded as a strong player, having beaten the human world champion Takeshi Murakami six games to none in 1997 &md ...

Professional career

Michael Buro is a professor at the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta (also known as U of A or UAlberta, ) is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta, and Henry Marshall Tory, t ...

in the

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

department.Michael Buro's University of Alberta page
/ref> He got his PhD from the

University of Paderborn Paderborn University () is a public research university in Paderborn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in 1972 and 20,308 students were enrolled at the university in the winter semester 2016/2017 in 62 different degree programmes. ...

in 1994.

Contributions

Michael Buro received his PhD for his work on Logistello - an Othello program that later defeated the reigning human World champion Takeshi Murakami 6-0 in 1997. The considerable playing strength of Logistello was based on its fast endgame solver, automatic opening book learning, selective alpha-beta search, and its fast and accurate state evaluator that was trained on millions of game positions. Michael's current research interests include heuristic search, machine learning, abstraction, state inference, and agent modelling applied to games. In these areas he and his students have made numerous contributions, ranging from developing fast geometric pathfinding algorithms, over hierarchical search methods, to creating one of the World's best program for Skat - a popular 3-player card game.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Academic staff of the University of Alberta Living people Paderborn University alumni {{US-mathematician-stub