One of the proving grounds for artificial intelligence is games. Classic games have a fixed set of rules, and these make it easier for researchers to develop new techniques and algorithms that enable computers to play (and hopefully win) various games. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess are all games where researchers have developed software that is capable of winning or drawing when paired off against the best human players in the world. Last weekend, researchers at the University of Alberta added another classic game to this list: poker. In a series of matches that took place over the Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, the researchers’ Polaris poker program won against a group of top-ranked online poker players.

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The problem Google (GOOG) is having monetizing its inventory of News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace pages may have more to do with faulty algorithms for ad serving than it does inherent issues with social networking sites.

That’s the conclusion Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield reached in a research piece today on News Corp. “While everyone is blaming social networking as the culprit for Google’s MySpace monetization problems, the real problem is Google itself and its search algorithms for social networking,” he asserts.

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