“Derek Oldbury, probably the second best player of all time, wrote an encyclopedia of checkers. It was effusive in its praise for the master: ‘Marion Tinsley is to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what Michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music.'” A person couldn’t beat Oldbury. But a person with a computer might be able to. Alexis Madrigal with the story of a duel between two men, one who dies, and the nature of the quest to build artificial intelligence: How Checkers Was Solved.