Chinook is the World Man-Machine Checkers Champion. It earned this title by competing in human tournaments, winning the right to play for the (human) world championship, and eventually defeating the best players in the world. The Man-Machine title was created to allow there to be both a human world champion and a computer world champion. The man-machine title is bestowed on the victor of a match between the best computer (Chinook) and the best human.

Chinook was developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Chinook is the by-product of a research effort started in 1989 into game-playing strategies. This project has had two goals:

* A short-range objective of developing a program capable of defeating the human World Champion in a match.
* A long-term objective of solving the game of checkers, i.e. determining the game-theoretic value of checkers.