Blondie24
Open-knowledge reference entry
Blondie24 is an artificial intelligence checkers-playing computer program named after the screen name used by a team led by David B. Fogel. The purpose was to determine the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence checkers-playing computer program.
The screen name was used on The Zone, an internet boardgaming site in 1999. During this time, Blondie24 played against some 165 human opponents and was shown to achieve a rating of 2048, or better than 99.61% of the playing population of that web site.
The design of Blondie24 is based on a minimax algorithm of the checkers game tree in which the evaluation function is a deep learning convolutional artificial neural network. The neural net receives as input a vector representation of the checkerboard positions and returns a single value which is passed on to the minimax algorithm.
The weights of the neural network were obtained by an evolutionary algorithm (an approach now called neuroevolution). In this case, a population of Blondie24-like programs played each other in checkers, and those were eliminated that performed relatively poorly. Performance was measured by a points system: Each program earned one point for a win, none for a draw, and two points were subtracted for a loss. Points were earned for each neural network after a multiple of games; the neural networks did not know which individual games were won, lost, or drawn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blondie24” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.