Teaching computers to play games has been a pursuit and passion for many programmers. Game playing has led to many advances in computing over the years, and the best computerized game players have gained a lot of attention from the general public (think Deep Blue and Watson). Using the Ricochet Robots board game as an example, let's talk about what's involved in teaching a computer to play games. Along the way, we'll touch on graph search techniques, data representation, algorithms, heuristics, pruning, and optimization.