Are Bees Better than Fruitflies?

Traditionally, chess has been called the "fruitfly of Artificial Intelligence". In recent years, however, the focus of game playing research has gradually shifted away from chess towards games that offer new challenges. These challenges include large branching factors and imperfect information. The game of Hex offers some interesting properties that make it an attractive research subject. This paper presents the key ideas behind Queenbee, the first Hex playing program to play at the level of strong human players.