Yes, most thinking games can be played by eight-year-olds. But they also can be and are played by adults. Some of the adults who find the games of particular interest are those with degrees in mathematics and computing. As you will see, these games can be enjoyed at many different levels. Eight-year-olds enjoy trying to win. Well educated adults enjoy the challenge of finding a strategy that ensures they will never lose.

Yes, most classic thinking games have been fully analyzed, and non-losing strategies have been found. But if you don’t know the non-losing strategy, then the challenge of finding one is still in front of you. If you’re playing a game with a friend, he or she probably doesn’t know a non-losing strategy either, so playing the game can be fun.

Yes, most of the games are easy to play. That’s one of the reasons eight-year-olds enjoy them. However, it doesn’t follow that finding a non-losing strategy is easy. In fact, finding a non-losing strategy can be very difficult. Consider the game of checkers.

In 1952, that’s over fifty years ago, Arthur Samuel wrote a checkers playing program for the IBM 701 computer. Samuel was interested in machine learning, and by 1959 he had developed a program that was a better-than-average checkers player. Samuel’s work is widely recognized as a significant achievement in artificial intelligence. Many others also worked on programs that would play checkers well enough to beat most if not all human opponents.

In 1989, Jonathan Schaeffer began working on a checkers playing program that is now called “Chinook.” Since then, Schaeffer and a small team of scientists have been continually improving Chinook. Eighteen years later, in July, 2007, Schaeffer and his team finally proved that Chinook was unbeatable. It will never lose to a human opponent. It would be difficult to describe their solution as easy when it took so long to perfect. Most classic thinking games can be solved in days or weeks rather than years, but the challenge of these games can also be far from easy. If you’d like to challenge Chinook, you can play against it whenever you like. Give it a try on the Web at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/play/. If you happen to win, please let me know. You’ll make the national news for sure!

What will this book do for you? It’s not the kind of book you can just relax and read. Don’t take it to the beach. You have to participate. My hope is that the book serves as your guide when you begin to explore classic thinking games. What it will do for you is a direct function of how much effort you’re willing to put into solving the problems—most of which do not have short or quick answers. If you read a problem and look up the answer, you might learn a little. If you read a problem and then spend an hour or two solving it on your own, I guarantee you will learn a great deal. That’s the approach you should use to make this book effective for you. The book is an excellent guide for independent study. If you’re using the book in a teacher led class, that’s even better. Your teacher is an additional resource when you have questions.

This book does not teach Java programming, but it can help you learn Java. If you know the basics of Java or another programming language, you know enough to follow all the examples in the text. If you know more than the basics, I encourage you to embellish the examples with attractive and functional displays of each game.

If you enjoy thinking, this book can occupy you for a long time. I hope you find the ideas it contains both fun and satisfying.