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Title: Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI by David B. Fogel ISBN: 1-55860-783-8 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Pub. Date: 22 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.68 (31 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: A personal quest for the deeper meaning of AI
Comment: An absorbing and enchanting tale of a personal quest for the deeper meaning of AI: the discovery of how intelligence itself arises. Fogel seizes the challenge by capturing the evolutionary process and shaping it to breed a checkers expert from an artificial neural net. Scientists, humanists, and artists will appreciate his inspiring wit and clarity of thought in narrating the growth of Blondie24, a synthetic sentience born inside a desktop PC.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Book With Deep Insights, Humor, and an Important Message
Comment: David has written an important and influential book. Not only is the discussion of Blondie24, the cute checker playing heroine of the book, a lively romp through the ins and outs of evolutionary programming but it lays the stage for David's more serious and far reaching discussion of what is right and wrong in our quest for a companion intelligence. It is this aspect of the book - David Fogel's keen insights into the meaning of machine intelligence and the ways in which we might grow and nurture our thinking machine of the very near future that I found the most arresting and thought provoking. In David's world view the AI community, by and large, has completely missed the boat - our current attempts to create intelligent machines by programming them to think is futile and, at the very least, misguided. Making short work of neural networks and chess playing programs, David uses the seeming simple but ultimately powerful example of Blondie24, a program that learns how to play checkers from pure trail and error - learning from experience in a process very similar to our own way of learning - to illustrate the power and range of possibilities in evolutionary programming.

This book is well written, easy (and , in fact, fun) to read and touches on topics that make it an important and necessary book for every intelligent reader in today's world of the internet and ever more powerful computers. I am impressed with David's well thought out observations on the role of evolutionary programming not only in the workings of Blondie24 but also as the core technology for the next generation of thinking machines. As the Chief Executive Officer of Natural Selection, Inc. David's views are more than academic musings, they are an important part of his company's business. Positioning himself as a new Darwin of evolutionary intelligence, this book - along with his previous book "Evolutionary Computation - Toward a New Philosophy of Machine Intelligence" - places Dr. Fogel as the leading exponent of this rapidly emerging paradigm in machine intelligence.

While an absolutely must read for all of us in the Artificial Intelligence field, this is a book for any curious reader who is interested in how (and perhaps when) the thinking machines of the near future will come about. And, of course, Blondie24 is a smart, intelligent creature whose attempts to divine the workings of the checker board are fun to follow and satisfying to share.

Rating: 4
Summary: An inspiring story about an artificially evolved algorithm
Comment: This book tells you the story of a computer algorithm that, in the words of the author, "taught itself to play checkers". The second section, which contains the core of the book, is organized as an abridged diary that describes the steps taken to create this program and to test it in rated competition under the name of Blondie24 against human opponents at an online gaming site.

Since the book is aimed at a general audience, the first section introduces all the relevant knowledge required to fathom the rest of the book. This section introduces the purpose of artificial intelligence, the demystification of the all-famous computer Deep Blue that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov, the basics of artificial neural networks and of the game of checkers, and a survey of previous attempts at producing computer programs to play checkers. The last chapter in this preparatory section states the two fundamental questions that the author (David B. Fogel) and his partner in this endeavor (Kumar Chellapilla) set out to answer when they started to build their own checkers program, which can be phrased as: (1) Can a computer program learn on its own the features important to play checkers at the level of a human expert? (2) Can this learning be achieved by just playing games against itself and receiving feedback only after a series of games without even knowing which games were won or lost but only how many?

Their approach consisted of using an idea borrowed from "mother nature" that only until recently has started to be embraced by the scientific community in the field of artificial intelligence. This idea is evolution. By combining random mutation with selection over a "population" of checkers-playing artificial neural networks that played against each other they obtained after 250 generations a program that was able to reach the expert-level rating and that even scored a few victories against human players rated at the master-level.

Most technical details are left out in order to make the text accessible to a wider audience. However, in the spirit of being a scientific document, there are references to all relevant scientific papers in case you want to do further research. The writing style is both engaging and easy to follow. In addition to the main text of the book, there is a wealth of notes in a special section at the end of the book which the author uses to expand on specific topics that might be of interest to the reader. It is for this separate notes section that you might benefit from using two bookmarks, instead of just one, while you read the book. There is also an interesting section in which the author addresses a series of objections that have been raised against the ideas he discusses in this book.

In my opinion, the only weakness of the book is that it spends too much ink in telling you about the moves that Blondie24 (and its siblings) made in some specific games. This will be of interest to you only if you are keen on checkers.

If you have an academic training equivalent to a B.S. in Computer Science you will have the additional benefit of ending up with a clear picture of how to reproduce the ideas used to create Blondie24, although no computer code is offered. The idea they use is so simple and yet so powerful that you'll be temped to jump into the bandwagon of evolutionary computation after reading this book.