
How Checkers Was Solved - panic
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/marion-tinsley-checkers/534111/?single_page=true
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blahedo
It's good, really, that this article focussed on Tinsley. I saw a talk by
Schaeffer about ten years ago, just as he was finishing up solving checkers,
and it was an astonishingly depressing talk. He invested his whole _life_
—decades—as I recall his marriage failed partially as a result of his
obsession with this—on what, in the end, was a lookup table. There was a lot
of neat engineering he had to do along the way (storage, parallel work) but
that's not what he cared about: he cared that he had solved checkers. Were
there any insights about patterns that could be induced, maybe to teach humans
how to do analysis or to learn some interesting mathematical fact about the
graph structure of the board? No—you just see what the board state is, and
look it up in the database to tell you the next move. I can't even tell you
how demotivational this speech was.

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Pulcinella
Sometimes I fear that this will be the end result of brain research. A vast
table that says: when these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means
happiness. When these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means the
brain is perceiving a tree.

We will understand the brain and consciousness and it will be completely
unenlightening... :(

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degenerate
There's no way to map "what is the meaning of life?" to a table, so you'll
never have that problem. As long as our universe and existence isn't 100%
solved, the human brain will never be solved!

~~~
fiblye
It's been a few years, but I recall there being research into 100% mapping out
crab or ant behavior and it was getting to a point of being quite accurate.

Mammal brains have a few extra layers of complexity, but none of those layers
involve magic. If ever we get around to "solving" one animal's brain, it shows
that others can be as well.

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logicallee
>none of those layers involve magic

This is a bold claim. How do you know? The brain could be magical.

I think everyone on this forum who is not a Christian can agreee that the
Christian God is in some sense "magical". Further, Genesis 1:27 says "So God
created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and
female He created them."

While this falls short of saying that, like God, humans are magical, to date
we have no proof they are not.

In that case the brain might be, for example, a magic antenna to another
plane.

See my comment here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230)

The choices are that the brain is magical or that strong AI that can do
anything a human brain can do (make judgments, parse text and images,
underdtand culture, communicate intelligently with humans), is in some sense
inevitable.

You cannot simply discount the possibility of magic. You must let people who
are committed to denying the future have their out.

If I were speaking with Lord Kelvin I would allow him the possibility that
birds are magical and not subject to the laws of physics, whereas any machine
humanity might ever build is - so that it is certainly possible that in
100,000 years, no one will build a heavier-than-air flying machine.

The essence of flight might be magical. So, too, the essence of thinking.

~~~
shawnz
> the Christian God is in some sense "magical" ... In that case the brain
> might be, for example, a magic antenna to another plane.

If those things were shown to really exist, then they would be part of what we
understand to be our reality. So they wouldn't be magical, it's just that our
understanding of what makes up reality could be incomplete.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
OK, but they would be _non-physical_. And that would mean that a materialist
understanding of humans would be incomplete. It might also mean that we cannot
ever build a human-equivalent AI.

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jpeanuts
A truly fascinating story. I recall reading another version with an additional
detail: after Checkers was solved Schaeffer evaluated every recorded game
Tinsley had played in his life - and determined that there were only a handful
of moves that he ever made in competition that were not perfect (in the sense
of perfect play). The vast majority of the time, if you were playing Tinsley,
you literally could not possibly win.

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dargopolis
Having read Jonathan Schaeffer’s great book One Jump Ahead, I couldn’t help
feeling that this article was a (well-written) book report which just barely
mentions its primary source. Nice summary, but read the original. I haven’t
read the second edition which apparently includes the follow-up story of
solving the game, but I found the first edition very compelling. I wonder if
the reporter was following the recent Deepmind/U of Alberta news and then came
across the checkers story. Disclaimer: I was in Jonathan’s compiler course 30
years ago, prior to Chinook.

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WalterGR
I had no idea that there was once a real-life incident reminiscent of the film
War Games!

 _[Solving chess] took Schaeffer harnessing computers all over the world,
drawing on and expanding his expertise in parallel computing. He conscripted
machines everywhere from Switzerland to Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, a major Department of Energy facility that often deals with
nuclear weapons._

 _“There was somebody else there [running a program] called BOMB and I was
running checkers programs,” Schaeffer told me. “It was a very strange
situation. Security should have been concerned.” And they were. They paid him
a visit after discovering gigabytes of data flowing out of a national lab to
Edmonton, Alberta._

(edit: add the remainder of the second paragraph.)

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joshvm
A great recent documentary on Checkers is King Me (trailer here;
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh8wyKabQiY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh8wyKabQiY)).
I say that as someone who is terrible at the game and doesn't enjoy playing
it.

One of the players it features is Ron King, who is currently one of the
strongest Checkers players. He holds the record for playing (and beating) 385
people simultaneously, though I believe he was beaten by Tinsley. Also his
trash talking is fantastic.

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Houshalter
There is a fantastic story on the first checkers AI here:
[http://relprime.com/chinook/](http://relprime.com/chinook/)

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kevinwang
That was one of the greatest stories I've ever heard

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viblo
If you like this story I suggest you take a look at the book "One Jump Ahead"
by Schaeffer for a lot more in depth view!

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RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
There's also Blondie24[0], which's got a pretty humorous backstory to its
namesake.

[0]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838/)

~~~
mholmes680
can second this recommendation. good, quick reading.

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trm42
Awesome story and well written.

