This is the home page of Jonathan Schaeffer, Professor in the
Department of Computing Science at the
University of Alberta.
I have a (sporadically updated) blog about my life in academia. Check it out
here.
My research area is artificial intelligence (AI). I am
best known for my work applying AI technology to
the problem of building high performance game-playing programs, as well as tackling the challenges
of the commercial computer games industry.
I am the lead author of the checkers-playing program Chinook, the first computer program to win a human world championship. In 2007 we announced that the game had been solved: perfect play by both sides leads to a draw.
