Checkers Is Beaten
I just read an article about a computer science professor who built a program, Chinook, that plays perfect checkers. How can they make this claim? They used the brute force method to compute every possible position and the possible resulting moves. Their program, with this enormous move database behind it, can only be drawn, not beaten.
I don’t play checkers very often, but I still think it’s interesting how they approached this problem. I can’t imagine the damage their results are going to do to the online checkers world, though. It’s probably hard enough to play against someone online who doesn’t have a computer checkers program assisting them. Now, they can use the Chinook proof and know for sure what the next best move is. Oh well. Maybe all those players can move up to chess now.
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