Jonathan Schaeffer was born in Toronto and completed a Bachelor of Science at the U of Toronto (2). He later chose the neighboring U of Waterloo to further his master's and Ph. D. works in mathematics (3). He specializes in Artificial Intelligence research in games programming for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alberta (including acting as Dean), and had since taken the posts of Vice-Provost for Information Technology and Dean of Science at the U of A in various years. He also received a Canadian Research Chair in AI, and has numerous books and research papers published to his name - including a (so-called "weak") solution to 8x8 draughts which took over a decade to compute.
Schaeffer learned AI by studying the source code of Ribbit (Computer) and other engines and has been on the team of a number of game engines authors, including: (1) Planner, Prodigy, Sun Phoenix (Computer) and The Turk (Automaton) (each developed as chess programs), (2) Chinook (checkers - of which fellow programmer Martin Bryant of X Colossus (Computer) fame eventually joined), (3) Fuego (Go), (4) Queenbee (Hex), (5) Polaris (Texas Hold'em), etc. (4) as well as used them in applied research fields such as DNA sequencing alignment.
Edmonton resident Schaeffer had a rating with the Chess Federation of Canada in the 1990s which was around 2200 (5) when he was playing more actively.
References: (1) One Jump Ahead (book by Schaeffer about his successes with Chinook), (2) http://harthouse.ca (U of Toronto site where many tournaments are held), (3) http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca (site of his graduate studies), (4) http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/ (U of Alberta games group), (5) http://www.chess.ca (Canadian Chess Federation), (6) https://www.chessprogramming.org/Jo... (biographical information about some of his other AI research accomplishments).
Wikipedia article: Jonathan Schaeffer
Kibitzing
