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Profeessor Marion Tinsley
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida

Dear Professor Tinsley:

Your letter to the editor of the Scientific American in the August issue
prompts me to write to you.  I quite agree with you in condemning
those who make extravagant claims for computer game
playing programs, but I do want to set the record straight as to who it is that
makes such claims.  This is a personal matter with me since it is my work that 
is all too often quoted in suffort of such claims.

My last published claim, so far as I can recall, was made in my 1967 paper,
and I quote "Unfortunately, the most basic limitation of the known machine
learning techniques, as previously outlined, has not yet been overcome nor
has the program been able to outplay the best human checker players." In a
footnote I further stated "In a 1965 match with the program, the World
Champion, Mr. W.F.Hellman, won all four games played by mail but was
played to a draw in one hurried cross-board game.  Recently Mr.
K.D.Hanson, the Pacific Coast Champion, has beeten current versions of of
the program on two separate occasions."  I am sure that Walter was not
playing at his best in the cross-board game but he was sufficiently
impressed to agree to the mail games. I might suppliment these remarks by
telling you that Ken Hanson worked with me for some time after this paper
was published and in spite of many improvements, Ken was able to beat the program
with increasing ease because of his knowledge of the
program's defects.  So I have always been very careful not to claim too much.

I must pleed guilty, however to agreeing to amatch with the Duke program
at a time when my program was not well adjusted.  The Duke program did
better than my program did and the Dyuke people were probably lead to
believe that their program was better than it really is, and to the extent
that I did not want to appear small I may have not been as outspoken as I
should have been in pointing out that the test was not perfectly fair.