3 ms·

I'm actually taking a class from Schaeffer at the moment. He is perhaps a bit odd, but so far he seems to be a decent professor.

• BrandonM 19y ago
  Oh, he seemed like a great guy. He just seemed to be overzealous to accomplish a goal that really didn't seem (to me) to matter that much. When he said something along the lines of "Marion Tinsley is human, and humans make mistakes. Chinook will play perfectly after checkers is solved. Therefore, Chinook is better than Tinsley," I could almost hear "mad scientist" laughter. To me, a program that already knows the right answer and simply looks it up in a database is much less interesting than a human who arrives at a similar answer through reasoning and intuition, or even an AI program that uses heuristics and some kind of internal scoring mechanism. That's not even mentioning that I think a multi-year computation on something like solving checkers is really a (nearly) useless endeavor. Whose lives will be made better by this? Only in academia could such resources be directed at something with no tangible end value. I guess it's an accomplishment for Schaeffer, but to me it seems like anyone could throw a bunch of CPUs at a program that iterates over all possible checkers positions. I just can't imagine getting much satisfaction for such an accomplishment.