Tinsley had been the world's best for 40 years, a time during which he'd ... It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit ... to prove that Chinook could have beaten the man was to beat the game itself. ... So when Schaeffer began building his own software, he went straight back to ...
Explanation:
Marion Tinsley—math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world—sat across a game board from a computer, dying.
Tinsley had been the world’s best for 40 years, a time during which he'd lost a handful of games to humans, but never a match. It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship.
His opponent was Chinook, a checkers-playing program programmed by Jonathan Schaeffer, a round, frizzy-haired professor from the University of Alberta, who operated the machine. Through obsessive work, Chinook had become very good. It hadn't lost a game in its last 125—and since they’d come close to defeating Tinsley in 1992, Schaeffer’s team had spent thousands of hours perfecting his machine.
The night before the match, Tinsley dreamt that God spoke to him and said, “I like Jonathan, too,” which had led him to believe that he might have lost exclusive divine backing.
So, they sat in the now-defunct Computer Museum in Boston. The room was large, but the crowd numbered in the teens. The two men were slated to play 30 matches over the next two weeks. The year was 1994, before Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue or Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.
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Contemporary accounts played the story as a Man vs. Machine battle, the quick wits of a human versus the brute computing power of a supercomputer. But Tinsley and Schaeffer both agreed: This was a battle between two men, each having prepared and tuned a unique instrument to defeat the other. Having been so dominant against humans for so long, Tinsley seemed to thrill at finally having some entity that could give him a real game. He had volunteered to play friendly matches against the computer in the run-up to their two world championship matches. And Schaeffer, though he was a bull-headed young man, had become the most effective promoter of Tinsley’s prowess and legacy.
