Located near the Brig Beaver II, site of the famous Boston Tea Party, the Computer Museum offers two floors of exhibits of the history of computers, computing, and robotics. It is also adjacent to the Children's Museum.

The playing site was in the 5th floor auditorium, and the windows from the auditorium provided an excellent view of downtown Boston.

Chinook ran on an 18 processor Silicon Graphics Challenge, equipped with 1 GB of RAM and 10 GB of disk space. Silicon Graphics also had an Onyx available to serve as a graphical output device as well as a backup machine to the Challenge.

Following Marion Tinsley's resignation of the 1994 Man vs. Machine World Checkers Championship due to illness earlier in the week, Don Lafferty, the United States Champion, arrived in Boston on Saturday August 20, 1994 to begin a 20 game match against Chinook. Once the contestents were settled in their chairs, Raymond Keene, one of the match organizers, conducted a brief opening ceremony.

Play commenced that afteroon. Lafferty is a cautious player with a tremendous knowledge of the openings (benefiting from his close relationship with Marion Tinsley). He scored a victory in Game 8 in the morning of Monday August 22 when a bug in Chinook caused a large mis-assessment of a position. Later that afternoon, Chinook evened the score in Game 10.

During most of the games, Jonathan Schaeffer operated Chinook and Rob Lake and Martin Bryant sat at a table near the Challenge. Paul Lu wandered about the audience and assisted with any requests from either Jonathan or Don.

Martin monitored the progress of each game on his laptop which ran Colossus, and Rob monitored the Challenge and used a laptop to release news of each game back home. He also used the laptop to continue working on the endgame databases back in Edmonton. Many spectators commented that we looked more like the press corps than members of the Chinook team!

During the last half of the match, NBC television dropped by everyday and broadcasted news of the match several times on their evening news program.

The match concluded on Thursday August 25 with 1 win apiece, and 18 draws. Since Chinook was the defending champion as a result of the previous Chinook-Tinsley match, it retained the title. Raymond Keene commenced the closing ceremonies by calling Lou Jennaro from Silicon Graphics to present the awards.

Lou Jennaro presented Jonathan Schaeffer and the rest of the Chinook team the Championship Trophy.

Next, Lou Jennaro presented Don Lafferty with the runner-up award.

Both Jonathan Schaeffer and Don Lafferty gave acceptance speeches.

Following the conclusion of the closing ceremony. the Chinook team members assembled for a final group photograph. From left to right, they are: Martin Bryant, Paul Lu, SGI Challenge, Jonathan Schaeffer, and Rob Lake.

Herschel Smith from Petal Mississippi has been a long supporter of our efforts. He remarked that this was the first time in his life he had ever held a World Championship Trophy.