Blondie 24: Playing At The Edge of AI (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (Paperback)

Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov but only after a multi-year effort involving special hardware and was a program that was specifically designed to play chess.

Blondie24 'evolved itself' using non-special hardware (Pentium 400MHz) and in a matter of months beats 99% of all human players - WITHOUT KNOWING ANYTHING ABOUT DRAUGHTS.

Part 1 of the book is an overview of the two philosophies of AI embedded in Deep Blue and Blondie24 respectively. The argument is well made that Hal2001 could never be programmed in a conventional fashion.

Part 2 is the story of Blondie's creation - if anything here the most impressive item is the author's enthusiasm which is contagious.

Three qualifications:

1) on a technical quibble front Blondie24 is actually a co-evolved board valuation function which can only play draughts as it is embedded in a conventionally programmed mini-maxing game playing program. However one can hardly quibble with an author who includes an appendix of criticisms of his contentions!

2) at a more fundamental level Blondie24 is not a learning program (as far as I can see it learns nothing from its games) but rather the output of a learning system. This may be an interesting area for future study as, having evolved a 'good solution' it seems a pity to then 'waste' its future experiences.

3) like most highly skilled people Fogel makes it look easier than it is. If, sucked in by enthusiasm, one is tempted to try for oneself such an approach one finds a great number of pitfalls - it ain't as easy as he makes it look :-)

Overall no hesitation in suggesting that you buy this book if you have a lively, wide-ranging mind. If you liked reading about any of Chaos, Complexity, ALife etc as new paradigms then you have to buy this one.

MRB

This book, by Dr David Fogel, shows how a similar level of play can be achieved but without giving the computer any knowledge of the game. In order to do this, the computer program uses a neural network in order to learn how to play checkers, in much the same way that a human would. In fact, a neural network is the closest thing we have to modeling the human brain on a computer.

The program also uses Darwin's principles of natural evolution (survival of the fittest) to "evolve" the best neural network, in the same way that we have evolved over millions of years.

At the start of the training period the computer is unable to play good checkers (in fact it would play terribly) but after a lot of training (by playing games against itself) it can play at the level of an expert.

Apart from being a very interesting story, this book also explains the latest principles behind the artificial intelligence techniques that are used.

An excellent book and if you are wondering why the book is called Blondie 24, it's because this was the name given to the program in order to tempt young male players to compete against it over the internet!!