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Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI by David B. Fogel Sales Rank : 253,486

Paperback: 424 pages Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1st edition September 22, 2001 ISBN: 1558607838 Product Dimensions: 7.0 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces. Average Customer Review: based on 32 reviews. Amazon.com What must it do to the human male ego to find out that the young woman who just handily won an online game of checkers is actually a sleek piece of software with no real understanding of the game's rules? Evolutionary programmers David B. Fogel and Kumar Chellapilla learned this and many other lessons in their quest to build a problem-solver divorced from human expertise. Fogel's book Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI captures their spirit of good-natured questioning of the received wisdom of traditional checkers playing and AI research.The writing is surprisingly engaging, coming from a software researcher; even readers with little interest in checkers will follow Fogel's many game analyses with rising interest as his neural networks increase in prowess. Ever the scientist, he includes a laundry list of fairly harsh critiques of his work--with rebuttals--as an appendix. Devotees of cutting-edge AI, online psychology, or tournament-level checkers will find plenty of interest in the exploits of Blondie24. --Rob Lightner Product Description: Blondie24 tells the story of a computer that taught itself to play checkers far better than its creators ever could by using a program that emulated the basic principles of Darwinian evolution--random variation and natural selection-- to discover on its own how to excel at the game. 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 strategies employed by human grand masters, or to databases of moves for the endgame moves, or to other human expertise about the game of chekers. With only the most rudimentary information programmed into its "brain," Blondie24 (the program's Internet username) created its own means of evaluating the complex, changing patterns of pieces that make up a checkers game by evolving artificial neural networks---mathematical models that loosely describe how a brain works. It's fitting that Blondie24 should appear in 2001, the year when we remember Arthur C. Clarke's prediction that one day we would succeed in creating a thinking machine. In this compelling narrative, David Fogel, author and co-creator of Blondie24, describes in convincing detail how evolutionary computation may help to bring us closer to Clarke's vision of HAL. Along the way, he gives readers an inside look into the fascinating history of AI and poses provocative questions about its future.

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