When Ken Chisholm was an undergrad, he was interested in Arthur Samuel's seminal AI learning program, CHECKERS. Ken implemented a similar Drafts-playing program from first principles, which by the time that I played it was in the incarnation known as "Draft4". (This copy was derived from the original learning version; it hard-wired the parameters which the learning version had tuned by self-play and several years of play against human opponents.) Ken has kept up his interest in the game ever since and his next implementation, Draft5GA, was based on a genetic algorithm. Draft6 is a Java version. I believe he's now on "Draft9" and I hope he'll give us a write-up of the history of the program from the beginning to date.
Ken has worked as a Systems Programmer with Prof. Stephen Salter (of nodding duck fame) at Edinburgh Wave-Power Project. He joined the Data Curator Project under Prof. Malcolm Atkinson (now at the dept. of Computer Science, University of Glasgow) as a research assistant, and stayed on as a research associate when it became the Persistent Programming Project; he helped with the design and implementation of PS-algol, the first orthogonally persistent programming language.