Patent ID: 7647289

Claim:
A method of learning a belief distribution for each of a plurality of patterns, each pattern corresponding to a move in a game, wherein the method is implemented by a processor executing computer-executable instructions stored in a computer-readable storage medium, the method comprising: accessing a collection of historical game records comprising sequences of moves; extracting, by the processor, one or more patterns for each move and selecting some of those patterns as harvested patterns and discarding others of those patterns to create pattern classes from the harvested patterns, wherein the harvested patterns are extracted from the historical game records on a basis of a set of pattern templates, wherein the processor uses the set of pattern templates for selecting as the harvested patterns those patterns that occur at least twice in the collection, while discarding patterns that do not occur at least twice; for each the pattern classes, determining other patterns corresponding to alternative legal moves which could have been played; accessing, for each pattern class, statistics describing a probability distribution associated with a belief about an urgency of a move relating to that pattern class, wherein the statistics are represented by a mean and a standard deviation of the probability distribution; updating the statistics represented by the mean and standard deviation associated with each pattern class during a learning process based on the harvested patterns for each pattern class for learning a belief distribution over a value of the urgency of each of the selected pattern classes, wherein the mean of the updated statistics represents a belief in a quality of a move associated with the pattern class; storing the updated statistics and the corresponding pattern class for access by a game engine; and accessing the updated statistics and corresponding pattern classes by the game engine during game play for ranking potential next moves when selecting a game move from among the potential next moves during game play.