#Strategies for chinese checkers software#

At the same time, the team that would form DeepBlue, the chess software that would eventually defeat Kasparov, was coming together. In 1989, he “crashed and burned” at the World Computer Chess Championships, however. He called it Phoenix and it was one of the better chess programs of many that were created in the 1980s. in computer science, so he decided to build a chess-playing program. But he also loved computers-and had done a Ph.D. Jonathan Schaeffer did not begin his career intending to solve checkers. People said to me, ‘You could never have beaten Tinsley because he was perfect.’ Well, yes, we would have beaten Tinsley because he was only almost perfect. “The reason was simple: I wanted to get rid of the ghost of Marion Tinsley. “From the end of the Tinsley saga in ’94–’95 until 2007, I worked obsessively on building a perfect checkers program,” Schaeffer told me. The results would be published July 19, 2007, in Science with the headline: Checkers Is Solved. With Tinsley gone, the only way to prove that Chinook could have beaten the man was to beat the game itself. Seven months later, Tinsley died, never having truly lost a match to Chinook.Īnd that would lead Schaeffer to undertake a 13-year computational odyssey to exorcise the man’s ghost. He’d devoted years of his life to creating a program that could beat the best checkers player ever, and just as he was about to realize this dream, Tinsley quit. Chinook became the first computer program in history to win a human world championship. But the next day, an X-ray revealed there was a lump on his pancreas. After six games-all draws-he needed to see a doctor. And Schaeffer, though he was a bull-headed young man, had become the most effective promoter of Tinsley’s prowess and legacy.īut there, in that hall, a quirk of human development was troubling Tinsley. He had volunteered to play friendly matches against the computer in the run-up to their two world championship matches.

Having been so dominant against humans for so long, Tinsley seemed to thrill at finally having some entity that could give him a real game. But Tinsley and Schaeffer both agreed: This was a battle between two men, each having prepared and tuned a unique instrument to defeat the other. Machine battle, the quick wits of a human versus the brute computing power of a supercomputer. The year was 1994, before Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue or Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.Ĭontemporary accounts played the story as a Man vs. The two men were slated to play 30 matches over the next two weeks. The room was large, but the crowd numbered in the teens.

So, they sat in the now-defunct Computer Museum in Boston. The night before the match, Tinsley dreamt that God spoke to him and said, “I like Jonathan, too,” which had led him to believe that he might have lost exclusive divine backing. It hadn't lost a game in its last 125-and since they’d come close to defeating Tinsley in 1992, Schaeffer’s team had spent thousands of hours perfecting his machine. Through obsessive work, Chinook had become very good. His opponent was Chinook, a checkers-playing program programmed by Jonathan Schaeffer, a round, frizzy-haired professor from the University of Alberta, who operated the machine. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship. It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. 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. Marion Tinsley-math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world-sat across a game board from a computer, dying.

Strategies for chinese checkers