By Randolph Schmid
Washington - Canadian researchers report they have solved checkers (also known as draughts), developing a program called Chinook that cannot lose in a game popular with young and old alike for more than 1 000 years.
"The program can achieve at least a draw against any opponent, playing either the black or white pieces," the researchers say in this week's online edition of the journal
Science.
"Clearly... the world is not going to be revolutionised" by this, said Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the department of computing science at the University of Alberta.
The important thing is the approach, he said. In the past, game-playing programs have used rules of thumb - which are right most of the time, he said - to make decisions.
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"What we've done is show that you can take nontrivial problems, very large problems, and you can do the same kind of reasoning with perfection. There is no error in the Chinook result. ... Every decision point is 100 percent."
Schaeffer's team started with the end of a game with just one checker on the board. Then the team looked at every possible position with two checkers, on up to 10 checkers on the board.
Every combination of 10 checkers offers 39 trillion positions for the endgame, he said. Chinook can calculate them all.
It does not matter how the players make it to 10 checkers left because from that point on, the computer cannot lose, Schaeffer said. For two players who never make a mistake, every game would be a draw, he said.
"'Checkers is solved' is an intriguing title for this wonderful and delightful article about another former human skill falling to the ubiquitous computer," said Ernest Hall, director of the Center for Robotics at the University of Cincinnati.
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