One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers

University of Alberta set out to build a world checkers champion. He succeeded. In 1994, CHINOOK, the program written by Schaeffer and his group, won the Man versus Machine World Checkers Championship. (Although CHINOOK has now mostly retired from championship checkers, it is still possible to play CHINOOK. To play CHINOOK or just see information about CHINOOK and checkers in general, go to www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook.) Schaeffer then went on to write a book about his quest. The result, One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers, is an extraordinary book. One Jump Ahead provides a history of CHINOOK, from its initial success in winning the United States Checkers Championship in 1990 through its losses to the world human checkers champion to its eventual success. By the way, Schaeffer gives an excellent talk about his experiences with CHINOOK that I also highly recommend. If One Jump Ahead had merely been a chronicle of the technical achievements in the development of CHINOOK, it would have been a good book. However, the book is instead more about the human aspects of Schaeffer’s journey from checkers neophyte to friend of many of the world’s best human checkers players. The last book that I read that was anything like One Jump Ahead was Tracy Kidder’s book, The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown, and Company, 1981). However, One Jump Ahead is quite different and, in my opinion, much better. The Soul of a New Machine was written by an outsider— one who was not really part of the activities involved in the building of a new microprocessor. Nevertheless, it pro-