Here's the story of a computer that taught itself to play checkers far better than its creators ever could. Blondie24 uses a program that emulates the basic principles of Darwin evolution to discover on its own how to excel at the game. Through this entertaining story, the book provides the reader some of the history of AI and explores its future.

Unlike Deep Blue, the celebrated chess machine that beat Garry Kasparov, the former world champion chess player, this evolutionary program didn't have access to other games played by human grand masters, or databases of moves for the endgame. It created its own means for evaluating the patterns of pieces that it experienced by evolving artificial neural networks--mathematical models that loosely describe how a brain works.

As we remember Arthur C Clarke's prediction of the successful creation of machines that think like humans, David Fogel dramatically demonstrates how evolutionary computation may in fact bring us to our goal of creating a thinking machine far more quickly than traditional artificial intelligence has been able to do. Mark Pearson

Review
"Meet Blondie. She's a 24-year old graduate student in mathematics at the University of California at San Diego. She skis and surfs, and is an ace at math. But her real claim to fame is her amazing ability to play checkers. She's really good--not good enough to defeat a grand master, but she did earn a spot in the top 500 of an international checkers tournament. Considering that she taught herself how to play without reading books, taking classes, or getting tips from experienced players --that's impressive. And considering that Blondie is only a computer program, and the rest of her persona is just a product my imagination, you might say that's really impressive!"
—from the Introduction

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