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Something from the poker domain (heads-up limit Texas Hold 'em):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ategy.html

Coming from Michael Bowling at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, I suspect that Jonathan Schaeffer of Chinook fame was part of the inspiration with his interest in poker.

The old timers here know about Schaeffer's computer chess work from his early 1980s program Phoenix which later became Sun Phoenix; one of the very first distributed processing chess programs.

sje wrote:Something from the poker domain (heads-up limit Texas Hold 'em):

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ategy.html

Coming from Michael Bowling at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, I suspect that Jonathan Schaeffer of Chinook fame was part of the inspiration with his interest in poker.

The old timers here know about Schaeffer's computer chess work from his early 1980s program Phoenix which later became Sun Phoenix; one of the very first distributed processing chess programs.

Not to mention Chinook and his battles with Marion Tinsley...

bob wrote: Not to mention Chinook and his battles with Marion Tinsley...

Oh man. Marion Tinsley was an incredibly strong checkers player. IIRC he lost only seven games in a career spanning over four decades. Two of the losses were to Chinook, although Tinsley had four wins against it in the same match, so he still won the match.

Schaeffer wrote a book (One Jump Ahead) about their experience building Chinook with the aim of unseating Tinsley as world champion.

He was so strong, and checkers is so drawish, that their entire strategy was focused around finding mistakes in human opening theory through exhaustive analysis (moves that would give Chinook a winning chance that human players would hopefully not recognize until a few moves later). They also made a huge distributed endgame generation effort, and by the time they were approaching world-class strength, Chinook could search some lines all the way into their databases (8-man or something) all the way from the opening position. But even with this omniscience, Tinsley was still nearly unbeatable. Schaeffer also proved later, that checkers is a draw with perfect play by both sides.

wgarvin wrote:

bob wrote: Not to mention Chinook and his battles with Marion Tinsley...

Oh man. Marion Tinsley was an incredibly strong checkers player. IIRC he lost only seven games in a career spanning over four decades. Two of the losses were to Chinook, although Tinsley had four wins against it in the same match, so he still won the match.

Schaeffer wrote a book (One Jump Ahead) about their experience building Chinook with the aim of unseating Tinsley as world champion.

He was so strong, and checkers is so drawish, that their entire strategy was focused around finding mistakes in human opening theory through exhaustive analysis (moves that would give Chinook a winning chance that human players would hopefully not recognize until a few moves later). They also made a huge distributed endgame generation effort, and by the time they were approaching world-class strength, Chinook could search some lines all the way into their databases (8-man or something) all the way from the opening position. But even with this omniscience, Tinsley was still nearly unbeatable. Schaeffer also proved later, that checkers is a draw with perfect play by both sides.

He was also a pretty good chess player. The world checker hall of fame is in Petal, Mississippi, about 5 miles from where I lived when I was in Hattiesburg (until 1985). Charles Walker built the hall of fame, and Tinsley visited regularly, playing most of his world championship matches there. He and Charles used to hit my office on a regular basis wanting to spar some with Cray Blitz. I was always able to set up time and I can recall one day where they teamed up against CB playing white every game, and playing the fried liver attack. CB had a good book for that since I played it myself, but it was also damned strong tactically, and try as much as they wanted, they never managed to beat it. But they had a lot of fun and it was a blast getting to chat many times with Tinsley. He was REALLY a class act. I finally convinced them that the Fried Liver is NOT a good opening against the computer, also. Or actually, Cray Blitz did.