Machine battle, the quick wits of a human versus the brute computing power of a supercomputer. The year was 1994, before Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue or Lee Sedol and AlphaGo.Ĭontemporary accounts played the story as a Man vs. The two men were slated to play 30 matches over the next two weeks. The room was large, but the crowd numbered in the teens. So, they sat in the now-defunct Computer Museum in Boston.

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. 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. Through obsessive work, Chinook had become very good. 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. But this was a different sort of competition, the Man-Machine World Championship. It's possible no single person had ever dominated a competitive pursuit the way Tinsley dominated checkers. 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.

Marion Tinsley-math professor, minister, and the best checkers player in the world-sat across a game board from a computer, dying.

Shuttie position in checkers