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Title: One Jump Ahead:: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers
ISBN: 0387949305
Author:
Jonathan Schaeffer
Publicate Date: 1997-04-24
Publish: 1997-04-24
List Price: $54.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $29.94
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $24.99
Amazon Merchant Price: $53.13
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Surprisingly good
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.
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2: Checkers isnt a real game
I began reading this book and around page 100 realized..... Who cares about a computer that can play checkers. Checkers isnt a real game the way chess it anyways. Now Deep Blue is an achievement.
The evolutionary computation was interesting but come on.... checkers? Why not spend months developing a program that can do something useful... like balance my checkbook.
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3: Honest
We haven't seen Chinook on CNN...yet.
The book has an intimate feel, like a diary almost,
but the details about how it was concieved, created,
and, laboriously, debuged, are great for those who
love AI and software creation in general.
The best parts of the book are the comparisions between
Chess and games of chance. Checkers is still not
"solved" but Chinook, and the team working at it,
have created a brute force attack on another board
game thats getting close.
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4: A Gripping Read
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.
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5: Very interesting!
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.
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