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When Marion Tinsley, the world number one, played checkers against Professor Jonathan Schaeffer's checkers-playing program Chinook for a series of exhibition matches in 1990, he declared: "I feel like a teenager again."In fact, Tinsley was 63 at the time, and he was widely regarded as the greatest checkers player who had ever lived. This happy state of affairs was not without drawbacks, though. For one thing, it meant that it was surprisingly hard for Tinsley to get a good game of checkers. (I'm sticking with 'checkers' instead of 'draughts' in this article out of deference to my interviewee, incidentally. Also, it's a wonderfully percussive clickety-clack kind of word.)
"The first thing you have to know about Tinsley is that Tinsley was more machine than human," Schaeffer explains to me when we chat over Skype. "He was almost perfect. You think of perfection with computers - you don't think of it with humans. There was a period from 1950 to when we played him another time in 1992 - 42 years in which he lost a total of three games. Three games in 42 years he lost. Two of those games were trivial blunders in obviously drawn positions. In 42 years there's only one documented case where he was actually out-played.
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