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\F3\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F4ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY\←L\-R\/'7;\+R\→.\→S   Telephone:
\←S\→.415-497-3330

\F1\CMay 23 1977


Mr. Ken Hanson
317 San Vincente Ave.siness
Salinas, Calif. 93901

Dear Ken:

\JBelieve it or not, I am back working on my old checker program.  The
revival of interest stems from the fact that my program was challenged and
beaten by a new program that two men at Duke University have been working
on for the last two or three years.  I thought that you might be
interested in the match, so I am enclosing a copy of a brief write-up that
I sent to a computer publication.

I got out an old copy of my program,
which turned out not to be the very latest, and fixed it up so it would run on
our present machine.  I was not at first able to get the learning program
working, so I used some old learning and it now seems that the version that I found
did not contain the very last corrections to the book games that you had put in.
Anyway, the Duke machine had the better of the match and my dander is up.

My reason for writing to you, other than to tell you of this match, is to
see if you might be interested in doing a little more work with me, this
time for free as I can not offer any pay.  Our project is hard up, as is
everyone these days,. I became Emeritus last September and I had been
working for free myself since even before that.  I get all of the machine
time that I want and I do have a terminal at home as well, but there is no
financial support available.

I have two things in mind,- in the first place, I would like to get the program
back to where it was and to add a number of improvements that have occurred to
me since I last worked on it.  I will need your help in getting the few
remaining bugs out of the game listings.  Most of this work could be done at your
home but you would want to come in a few times and there would be some traveling
involved on your part.

As a second project, I would like to see your work in debugging the master
play made generally available, perhaps by publishing a revised and
anotated Lee's Guide.  We probably could not call it a Lee's Guide, for
copyright reasons, and this might be one reason for extending it to
include data from Kear, Bolan and even perhaps Tescheleit as well.
Actually, I think that it could very well be much more than just another
checker book.  With the computer tools that we now have available, it
should be rather easy to produce the text, suitable for photo-ofset
printing, for a book with information presented in two ways, firstly, in
the usual game with variations form and secondly, with a listing of board
positions, with the recommended move or moves and perhaps even
cross-referenced to the games in which these positions occur.  If we work
out a suitable format then perhaps the ACF might even want to back the
project and we could then get help in the form of listings of other games
that could be included, and it could well be made into an authoritative book.

I then have an even more ambitious project in mind, in that I would like
to have additional information appended to the book listings, not as I
earlier thought, as to why the chosen move is the best one but rather why
each of the other possible moves is not a good one. In this way one gets a
great deal more information out of each move and this could be used by the
program to improve its play.  This would take a lot of work and it could only
be done by someone with a lot of checker knowledge, such as yourself.

I heard from Grandjean recently, and he tells me that you continue active
and are playing expertly.  I trust that you and your family have been
well.\.

\←L\→S\←R\-L\/'2;\+L\→L

Sincerely,



Arthur L. Samuel

\←S\→L
ALS:pdp10