When Ken Chisholm was an undergrad, he was interested in [http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/441/samuel.pdf 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 "[http://www.gtoal.com/athome/edinburgh/emas/assorted/games/drafts.imp.html Draft4]". (This copy was derived from the original learning version; it hard-wired the [http://www.gtoal.com/athome/edinburgh/drafts/boards parameters] which [http://www.gtoal.com/athome/edinburgh/drafts/draft41s.imp.html 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, [http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~ken/draft5ga.html Draft5GA], was based on a genetic algorithm. [http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/module/op/resources/moduleid/CO22006 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.