"Meet Blondie, a twenty-four-year old graduate student in mathematics at the University of California at San Diego. She skis and surfs and is an ace at math, but her real claim to fame is her ability to play checkers. She's not good enough to defeat a grand master (yet), but she did earn a spot in the top 500 of an international checkers tournament. Not bad when you consider that Blondie taught herself how to play without reading books, taking classes, or getting tips from experienced players. Even better when you realize that Blondie is a computer program and the rest of her persona is a product of the author's imagination." "Blondie24 tells the story of a computer that taught itself to play checkers far better than its creators ever could by emulating the principles of Darwinian evolution and discovering innovative ways to approach the game. In this year of 2001, as we remember Arthur C. Clarke's predictions, David Fogel dramatically demonstrates how evolutionary computation may enable humans to create a thinking machine far more readily than the techniques traditionally used in the study of artificial intelligence."--Jacket.