Looks a bit (or more) like Watson. This class of algorithms are unexpectedly powerful and not only in the IBM domain.
Potentially useful all over the place and I am quite happy about them. A very good work under way.
78%? Depending on the difficulty, that could either be equivalent to an eight year old child or a dedicated gamer. I wonder how long it will take until they get a computer that can beat Koreans at Starcraft :)
I was a civ junkie for a long time... one interesting thing is that the manual had structured data representations of everything in the game. It was also deadly exploitable, you would usually just not use certain strategies because they're boring.
Press release
The actual paper
The team has been rather exemplary when it comes to scientific openness: "The code, data and complete experimental setup for this work are available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/civ ." And although I haven't downloaded it because it's a 1,1 gigabyte file, the page appears to contain a virtual machine with everything you need to actually run the experiment. I was expecting to a see a bunch of different, poorly documented files that you would have a hell of a time running if you didn't have exactly the same system as the researchers, so this was quite a pleasant surprise. (Of course, if I downloaded the VM it could be that it's still exactly that bad. :)