• Calendar

December 14, Wednesday
11:00 – 13:00

Arthur Samuel's pioneering machine learning papers are classics. Yet he is best remembered for his checkers-playing program. In 1963, his program defeated a human opponent in a single game, a milestone for the fledgling field of artificial intelligence. Since that historic encounter, checkers has been branded as a "solved" game. As a result, checkers was passed over in favor of using chess as an experimental testbed for artificial intelligence research.

The 1963 game was an aberration. In 1994, the program Chinook became the official World Man-Machine Checkers Champion, finally realizing Samuel's dream. Along the way, there was an imposing obstacle to overcome: the unbeatable human World Champion, Dr. Marion Tinsley. And thus begins our story…

Although initially begun as a research project, the Chinook effort soon changed directions and became a quest to defeat Tinsley. Instead of an impersonal contest between a man and a machine, it became a personal battle between two humans striving for supremacy at checkers. In this talk, the creator of Chinook presents the personal and technical sides of man versus machine for the World Checkers Championship.

Short Biography:

Jonathan Schaeffer is the chairman of the Department of the Computing Science, University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada. He is also the head of the "games group" of that department which are the world leaders in machine game playing research for over 20 years. He has done a considerable amount of work on games over the years and he is the creator of "Chinook" - the world champion in Checkers.