How Checkers Was Solved - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 4,336 words · saved by 1 readers

The story of a duel between two men, one who dies, and the nature of the quest to build artificial intelligence

Marion Tinsley—math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world—sat across a game board from a computer, dying. Tinsley had been the world’s best for 40 years, a time during which he'd lost a handful of games to humans, but never a match. It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship. His opponent was Chinook, a checkers-playing program programmed by Jonathan Schaeffer, a round, frizzy-haired professor from the University of Alberta,

How Checkers Was Solved - The Atlantic

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