When he was growing up in Ohio, his parents were avid card players, dealing out hands of everything from euchre to gin rummy. Meanwhile, he and his friends would tear up board games lying around the family home and combine the pieces to make their own games, with new challenges and new markers for victory. Bowling has come far from his days of playing with colourful cards and plastic dice. He has three degrees in computing science and is now a professor at the University of Alberta. But, in his heart, Bowling still loves playing games.

Michael Bowling has always loved games. When he was growing up in Ohio, his parents were avid card players, dealing out hands of everything from euchre to gin rummy. Meanwhile, he and his friends would tear up board games lying around the family home and combine the pieces to make their own games, with new challenges and new markers for victory. Bowling has come far from his days of playing with colourful cards and plastic dice. He has three degrees in computing science and is now a professor at the University of Alberta.

CHINOOK that I also highly recommend. AI Magazine Volume 20 Number 1 (1999) ( AAAI) vided more than a glimpse of the intense process it described. One Jump Ahead was written by the person most involved in the process. Thus, it provides us with a direct view of Schaeffer's maturation--a maturation that we should all hope to have. Schaeffer does not pull any punches in his book; we see many of his elations, his disappointments, and his flaws.

Samuel's successes included a victory by his program over a master-level player. In fact, the opponent was not a master, and Samuel himself had no illusions about his program's strength. This single event, a milestone in AI, was magnified out of proportion by the media and helped to create the impression that checkers was a solved game. Nevertheless, his work stands as a major achievement in machine learning and AI. Since 1950, the checkers world has been dominated by Tinsley.

This work remains a milestone in AI research. Samuel's program reportedly beat a master and "solved" the game of checkers. Both journalistic claims were false, but they created the impression that there was nothing of scientific interest left in the game (Samuel himself made no such claims). Consequently, most subsequent game-related research turned to chess. Other than a program from Duke University in the 1970s (Truscott 1979), little attention was paid to achieving a world championship-caliber checker program.

So, they sat in the now-defunct Computer Museum in Boston. The room was large, but the crowd numbered in the teens. The two men were slated to play 30 matches over the next two weeks. The year was 1994, before Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue or Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. Contemporary accounts played the story as a Man vs. Machine battle, the quick wits of a human versus the brute computing power of a supercomputer.

Garry Kasparov plays a move against Deep Blue in their first game in Feb. 1996. Twenty-one years ago today, IBM computer Deep Blue famously beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov at his own game. While Deep Blue would go on to lose the full match, the event launched a long line of victories by artificial intelligence (AI) over humans in gaming. Since Deep Blue's initial triumph, many computer systems have challenged humans in other complicated games, like Go and poker. Games might seem a trivial way to measure AI.

And now, after putting dozens of computers to work night and day for 18 years--jump, jump, jump--he says he has solved the game--king me!. "The starting position, assuming no side makes a mistake, is a draw," he says. Schaeffer's proof, described today in Science (and freely available here for others to verify), would make checkers the most complex game yet solved by machines, beating out the checker-stacking game Connect Four in difficulty by a factor of a million. "It's a milestone," says Murray Campbell, a computer scientist at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., and co-inventor of the chess program Deep Blue. "He's stretched the state of the art." Although technological limits prohibit analyzing each of the 500 billion billion possible arrangements that may appear on an eight-by-eight checkerboard, Schaeffer and his team identified moves that guaranteed the game would end in a draw no matter how tough the competition.

The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved". Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago. The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.

Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw. Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts. The team directed Chinook so it didn't have to go through every one of the 500 billion billion (5 * 1020) possible moves.