From the looks of it, the program merely learned the rules of the game by doing textual analysis of the manual, and maybe got a few strategic hints as well. As

From the looks of it, the program merely learned the rules of the game by doing textual analysis of the manual, and maybe got a few strategic hints as well. As for actually learning to play the game _well_, my sense from the article is that the program then used more conventional machine learning techniques to test and adopt winning moves.