Customer Reviews

One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Once I started to read this book I found it difficult to put down. Granted I am addicted to playing checkers against my computer when taking breaks at work, but still.... This is very interesting material for checkers players and computer programmers alike.

However, I do have a couple of problems with the book. First, it is very poorly edited. There are a number of grammatical mistakes, [one right on the first paragraph], the author at times goes into unnecessary tangents and, in general the book is too long and repetitive. In addition, it bothered me that, perhaps because of the author's familiarity with chess, he decided to use chess notation to describe the games. This makes it more difficult for checkers players to follow the games while reading the book. The author/editor should have made the effort to use checkers notation or to provide better diagrams.

I'm a biased reviewer since I was involved in the Chinook project and I'm mentioned a number of times in the book.

Others have already pointed out how this book reads like a thriller. I agree completely. Each time that I re-read this book (which is almost like a yearbook for me), I get a rush out of how effectively Jonathan takes the reader into his own mind, the (computer) mind of Chinook, and the minds of Chinook's opponents (often through their own comments and game annotations). I squirm at the retelling of how Chinook lost the first two matches in Hot Springs (1992) where I sat Poker-faced as I operated the computer.

Another strength of this book is how Jonathan fearlessly pulls no punches in presenting balanced portraits of the many people involved in the Chinook story. Don't expect a forgettable puff piece. Scientists and champions are not immune from human foibles. In dispelling that illusion, Jonathan tells a honest and valuable story. Nobody escapes Jonathan's (sometimes) sharp criticism: not myself (deserved), not some of the luminaries of checkers (accurate, in my opinion), and especially not Jonathan himself. But Jonathan balances this with genuine praise, affection, and respect in almost every case. Consequently, the book contains many insights on human nature, the nature of AI, and what happens when they cross paths.

This book tells the story of an ambitious computer scientist who sets out to write a program that can beat the World Checkers Champion. He succeeds, although it takes him six years to achieve his goal. On the technical side, the book describes how the checkers program works, and how much effort it took Schaeffer and his team to make it play well enough to beat the human Champion. On the human side, it tells the story of the amazing Dr. Tinsley, probably the best checkers player who ever lived, who had beaten all his opponents, who had become bored with the game, and who finds in the computer a fresh opponent that has no fear for him, that plays for the win, that is actually fun to play against.

The most intense passages of the book are the ones where Schaeffer, as the operator of his program, has to watch his creation make moves he doesn't trust, but cannot do anything about. The most intriguing aspect of the book is that the way in which Chinook calculates it! s best moves doesn't come close to how man does it. (Or how we think we do it.)

Chinook's is a fascinating story. The book is very well written, and reads like a thriller.

It is rare for programmers and computer scientists to be good writers, and even rarer for them to write their own popular accounts of a major research project. Schaeffer has succeeded in doing that and his book both entertains and enlightens even those who have a casual interest in Artificial Intelligence.

In some cases the book reads like a thriller, as the reader gets caught up in Schaeffers quest to beat the world's reigning checkers champion. I particularily enjoyed his explanations of some of the more technical parts of the project, debugging software, problems with paralell computing etc. All of this is written a very accessible level.

First off - i don't play checkers, and prior to reading this book, i didn't want to. Second - i do research in game AI (although significantly different than the type of work described here) and even went to a few conferences with the author, though we've never spoken (he had a reputation for being a bit of a jerk). So my review is from the point of view of a non-checkers playing engineer.

First off, the book is incredibly meticulous in keeping track of what happened when. The author apparently asked everyone he knew to email him about various events because he often quotes long passages from other people. For example, he might describe a game he won or lost and then ask the person he played against and the judge of the match to describe it in their own words.

Second, i thought the book was pretty easy to understand. i know computers so maybe i'm not a good judge there but he did a good job explaining checkers (and chess, which comes up) so that i understood what was going on.

Third, he makes checkers seem interesting, or at least as much as i think he can. Apparently normal checkers isn't interesting but in tournaments they play odd varieties like two ballot (explained in the book) which makes for a much more interesting game than i would have expected. He also makes it easy to understand why checkers is a hard game requiring a lot of skill, which i wouldn't have guessed before this book.

Fourth, the author lets you know that he is a jerk. He doesn't appear to do anything to hide his faults or make you like him. In the book he repeatedly apologizes to people for how he's treated them. Honestly, i liked the author a lot more after reading this book. His issue is that he's very focused, driven and competitive and that results in things like snapping at his students and not giving his family enough attention. It doesn't necessarily excuse it but it makes the author easier to understand. It's also a pretty major accomplishment for an autobiography - not once did i get the feeling that the author was lying, exaggerating or trying to tell you how to think (except for his constant effort to convince you that checkers and checkers players are great people). He's just a guy trying to be honest, and i respect that.

Fifth, the book was a great look at how well technology did and didn't work in the '90s (computers were constantly crashing and network lines going down) and how tournaments come into being (sponsors, venues, judging, sportsmanship, personalities, press and a lot of other issues that i thought would be boring but weren't).

Finally, the book isn't quite the success story you might expect. The majority of the story is about how the author failed, quite often because he did something stupid he knew he shouldn't do (like optimizing code so much that he broke it). At the end of the story (and many, many years of research), the computer is maybe finally good enough to be world champion but no one will ever find out because the real champion resigned due to health problems and shortly after that died. i think it's hard to overestimate how much the author respected the guy he could never beat.

This doesn't seem like the kind of book anyone should really enjoy reading. An engineer describes how he wrote a computer program? Even engineers read it because they have to, not because they enjoy it. But i really liked this book. If you aren't a computer person, i honestly don't know if you'll like it, but give it a shot, i think just about anyone would enjoy this book.

Well I never thought that title would describe for a book on a project to create a world champion beating chequers playing program!

I originally read the first half of the book when staying with a friend. When I got home I had - for the first time in my life - to buy a book merely to read half of it, so un-put-downable is it.

The book requires no technical knowledge either or computers of of draughts (and to an extent if one approaches it expecting technical insights in to either one will be disappointed).

In practice it's such a good read as the story is well told and gathers momentum the nearer the author gets to the goal. It is focused on the people and the project and not the technicals. Schaeffer recounts his hopes, feelings and motivations with a brutal honesty - never shying away from an accurate description when authorial licence might have presented him in a better light.

im enjoying this a bit but im also a checker player and would defintely like the checker coordinates ( numeric notations) shown in every instance as I dont have them memorized, so I can follow the book better. I would not buy it as its more about the ego of the programmer than about checkers.

This book is about one man's obsession to develop a computer checkers program to beat a World Champion. The world champion in checkers is not just another world champion but a man widely accepted as the greatest checker player of all time - Terrible Tinsley. The book documents how the author developed and nurtured a weak checker program to become a world class program. Ultimately he fails but unfortunately doesn't admit this and has excuses and accusations on most of the latter pages. The author is perhaps a little immature and certainly self-centred and I await a revised edition where the author has the benefit of hindsight to recognise the failings in himself as an individual, and the bad feeling he has probably left in a game playing community which went out of their way to help him achieve his aim. A psychologist would find this book interesting - a study of a man who is afraid to lose, afraid to admit defeat and thinks he was the star of the show. There are only two stars in this book; Terrible Tinsley and a man named Lafferty. The author bad-mouths everyone in this book from Tony Buzan, a mind-mapping expert, Tinsley, Lafferty, a christian named Walker, his team, in fact everyone. Overall, though, a good book to pick up from Amazon if you accept that the author is far from perfect as an individual.

I enjoyed reading this book but as a serious checker player was hoping there was a detailed list of new moves , 4, against 3, Ect.. a listing of cooks, detailed, a checker learning experence Something teaching me, some new endgames, something. New openings, challenging the existing openings. Im sure computer/checker players would love this book Since Jonathan chose to not use standard numeric notations as in most checker books, the helpful way would have identified the notations in each illustration of the checker board.

Jonathan Schaeffer's book is a must-read for people interested in making computers behave intelligently.