Now that bosses have replaced droves of workers who would sit around on company time engaged in trivial pursuits with efficient and un- distractable machines, scientists are teaching the machines to play games as well. Contributors in computer science, artificial intelligence, game theory, military theory, and other fields explore such dimensions as whether machines should learn how to play games, a survey of the field, human learning in game playing, reinforcement learning and chess, comparison training of chess evaluation functions, a tutorial on Hoyle, acquiring go knowledge from game records, and learning to play strong poker. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)