Hi Kevin,
I forgot to mention that your strategy in the chess/othello game is a good one IMHO. Building up a store of positions and giving them "ranks" is the way to go. I think we do that internally ourselves in many games. Then you add the ability to look ahead two, three or more "turns" to this and you start to make better defensive decisions.
EG
pick the best 6 ranked possible plays (the 6 is called the "width").
switch to the opponent and evaluate the 6 best replies against each, essentially repeating step one. Keep switching and evalulating the ranks at each level until you have gone 3-6 (the "depth") or so games turns ahead. By now you should have decided the best initial move.
This is a very recursive process so you should be able to program in a way that allows you to easily change the width and the depth.

If you want to get your database of stategic positions ranked better then start from the simpler "end game" positions and work backwards.

Hope this helps
Dave

>>>I've got a rough schema for pattern recognition vai a neural net type arrangement that can be stored in .dbfs.
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>What's a NEURAL NET TYPE arrangement?? Sounds like something from Star Trek! :) Or if you tell me you'll have to kill me??
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>>>You really have to purpose build the "net" with much of the heuristic (rules of thumb) level of intelligence pre-built. That's hard :-)
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>Yeah, in my chess/othello game, I started writing AI that basically assigned different values to different strategic positions on the board. The computer would look at where it's pieces were, what the value of those positions were and calculate which moves would result in higher numbers. It actually worked ok for offense but the real problem was defense. I wanted to have it "learn" different offensive tactics from the human player so that it would know how to defend itself. But it got a little over my head and I haven't really picked it up again since. But if I recode it in VFP, I could use tables to store information that it learns and could scan that info very quickly if needed.
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>Later.