I'm John Bastard. I am with Oliver Raider, his new book is Seven Games, a human history.

We turn to checkers because checkers always struck me as a young person easier than chess.

For example, all the pieces look the same so I could stack them up and all you do is get

to the back and something magical would happen, the back row. But turns out there is someone

we all need to remember when we played checkers. His name was Tinsley. He's gone now. He's

born in 1927. He left us in 1995. Who was he, Oliver?

Mary and Tinsley was the best checkers player there's ever been. And indeed, I would argue the best

competitor at any competitive pursuit in the history of the world. There was a 40-year stretch of

competitive checkers play where Tinsley played thousands of games and lost exactly three times.

So this was sort of his prowess at the checkers board. And in real life, he was a minister

and a math professor. And it was sort of checkers and his Christian faith that sort of occupied

his life and an equal measure, it seems. And insights into the game of checkers would come to him

out of the clear blue sky, he said, just like his insights into scripture. So this is the man.

And this man, Mary and Tinsley caught the attention of a man in Jonathan Schaeffer,

who was a computer scientist at the University of Alberta, who got into his mind that he wanted

to conquer the game of checkers. And he wanted to beat the great Tinsley. And I don't want to spoil

too much of my opening chapter. But what ensues is this great, for the most part,

friendly, epic, heartbreaking battle between Mary and Tinsley, the human checkers player and

Jonathan Schaeffer, the human computer programmer. And I would inject one thing into this story,

which is oftentimes these battles are built as man versus machine or human versus machine.

But I'm careful to note that there is really no such thing. I mean, there were humans that built

these machines. So these human versus machine battles are really human versus human,

...