Flutterby™! : Checkers solved!

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Checkers solved!

2007-07-19 23:19:39.50247+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Awesome! Checkers has been solved, if both players play perfect games it's a draw.

[ related topics: Games ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2007-07-19 23:23:57.987744+00 by: Dan Lyke

Here's Chinook, the software that plays a perfect game of checkers.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-07-19 23:53:13.137878+00 by: other_todd

I hate to rain on everybody's parade, but this strikes me as mathematics proving something that anybody who'd bother to think about a game of checkers kinda knew instinctively anyway. I guess I'm missing the point.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-07-20 00:13:13.241038+00 by: Medley

It's a cool result. Proof is different from intuition (there are counter-intuitive facts, after al), and the methods may prove more broadly applicable.

Also interesting is that such a simple game required such vast amounts of computation to solve in a brute force fashion -- that fact alone has implications.