50 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A personal quest for the deeper meaning of AI, October 3, 2001
This review is from: Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (Paperback)
An absorbing and enchanting tale of a personal quest for the deeper meaning of AI: the discovery of how intelligence itself arises. Fogel seizes the challenge by capturing the evolutionary process and shaping it to breed a checkers expert from an artificial neural net. Scientists, humanists, and artists will appreciate his inspiring wit and clarity of thought in narrating the growth of Blondie24, a synthetic sentience born inside a desktop PC.
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who is the genius: David or Blondie?, December 27, 2001
This review is from: Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (Paperback)
The most enthralling account of what otherwise could have been a dry discussion of some arcane research. I have a couple of whimsical comments before I get on to the review proper.
David and Kumar played Blondie24, a computer program, against human opponents on a web site. They found that when they played using their own names, they were not invited to play many games. When they changed the name they used to that of a Star Wars(tm) character, they became more popular. However it was only when they started using 'Blondie24' as a name that everyone wanted to play them. This lesson was not lost on David when it came to naming his book...:)
In an early part of the book, David discusses the Turing test, which involves fooling a human observer into believing that a man, hidden from the observer, is actually a woman, based on responses to the observer's questions. Replace the man with a machine and repeat the experiment. David and Kumar seem to have run a little Turing test of their own. Humans at the checkers web site believed they were playing against another human, not a computer program. Indeed they were fooled into thinking they were playing a young woman, not a couple of frizz-haired mad scientists. (Please note I have no direct evidence to support my description of David and Kumar.)
An Artificial Neural Network/minimax program, Blondie24, learns to play checkers at expert level without being taught, without access to the vast human knowledge of the game. Significantly, Blondie24's game relies on n-ply position evaluation without recourse to an end-game database or opening book. The work of David and Kumar demonstrates that a solution to a problem is not always a necessary precursor to developing a computer program. Let the program find the solution on its own.
David's book is an entertaining and elucidating account of the development of Blondie24, a program that taught itself to play checkers. In it, he discusses why traditional AI research has been less than spectacularly successful and proposes a new direction: evolutionary computation. To prove the validity of this approach, he and his colleague Kumar develop a program that through the process of evolution through natural selection, learns to play checkers at expert level.
Blondie24 was put through its paces at a checkers web site, where it attained a level of 'expert'. Human players, who believed they were competing with a lady, blonde, 24, math major, were engaged in games over a period to determine how effectively the evolutionary computation approach had developed a competitive checkers player. This section of the book makes gripping reading, unlike this review.
I've had the opportunity to play Blondie24, which is now available as a PC game, and can attest to the strength of its game. There are four 'difficulty' levels, from novice to expert, so it suits all players. Not only does it play a great game, the presentation which revolves around film footage of your opponent, can be sometimes hilarious and sometimes infuriating. It is interesting to try and imagine what the program is doing while you are playing it.
I urge everybody with even a passing interest in the field of AI to purchase this book. Read it and then consider: is the genius David (and Kumar), who developed this program, or Blondie24, a program that taught itself to play checkers at a level much higher than its creators.
The serious AI researcher should also consider David's other books, also available at amazon.
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Something Much More Interesting And Elegant, October 9, 2001
This review is from: Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (Paperback)
Blondie24 is a fascinating and informative book that will be absolutely engrossing for anyone with an interest in artificial intelligence and computers. Although Master-level checkers programs have been around for a while, they have all used brute force to achieve their goals. The Blondie24 project represents the first serious attempt since Samuel's experiments in the 1950s to do something much more interesting and elegant: create a checkers program that can learn on its own. This book is easily accessible for the uninitiated, and I guarantee that you'll be swept along.
Gil Dodgen, author of the highly acclaimed computer program, World Championship Checkers
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