Fancy a gme of Checkers? (Draughts to us English people...)

[thatbloke]

Fancy a game of Checkers? (Draughts to us English people...)

Well a team of researchers has now "beaten" the game of draughts... that is to say that they have created an AI that cannot be beaten at the game becuase it knows the best move to make in every possible situation. The best you can hope to do is to draw, assuming your play is also flawless.

From the slashdot post:

My story on the Nature site announced that a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta has solved checkers. From the game's 500 billion billion positions (5 * 10^20), 'Chinook' has determined which 100,000 billion (10^14) are needed for their proof, and run through all relevant decision trees. They've set up a site where you can see the proof, traverse the logic, and play their unbeatable automaton. '[Jonathan] Schaeffer notes that his research has implications beyond the checkers board. The same algorithms his team writes to solve games could be helpful in searching other databases, such as vast lists of biological information because, as he says, "At the core, they both reduce to the same fundamental problem: large, compressed data sets that have to be accessed quickly.

EDIT: crap. can a nice mod please correct the typo in my thread title?

[Mod] Minor Title error edited [/Mod]