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why not leave things as they are?

Posted By: Jake Jacobs
Date: Monday, 4 June 2012, at 2:55 p.m.

In Response To: why not leave things as they are? (Daniel Murphy)

Yes he was. The very first personal PC I ever saw belonged to Jason Vollmer, who wrote the program. This wasn't the first time Craig's brain had been picked for a gaming program. Craig was the US Junior Chess Champion one year before Greg Defotis. Circa 1970 he began a brief stint at Northwestern, and while there was the expert source for the programmers working on a chess program that (they tell me) was the Deep Blue of its day.

I saw the PC at Jason't house in San Diego in the summer of 1983, and he and Craig were already working on the backgammon program. A group of us, including Craig, had gone to Imperial Beach to route for a then well-known player named Todd Vanderpluym, who was the world's greatest sand castle builder. (He won his 3rd consecutive US championship while Craig, Nack, Peter Wagner and I were allowed to help build a sand barrier - the tide conditions were unusual that day.)

The second PC was in January of 1984, and it was then that I made my least successful prediction, ever. The PC belonged to Bill Benter, and he asked me if I thought horse racing could be beat using a computer. "Forget it, Bill," I told him. "We knock ourselves out trying to beat the half percent at blackjack. The tracks take seventeen percent? You'll never win any money."

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