
Checkers Is Solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw - divia
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1144079
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BrandonM
Jonathan Schaeffer (the guy behind this project) gave a speech at this year's
SIGCSE (computer science education) conference. The article says that
artificial intelligence techniques were used to solve checkers, but it was
really just brute force. He had a database of all possible 10-piece setups
solved, and then he began iterating over all other positions. Of course, once
a position reduced to one of the 10-piece positions, that particular game was
solved.

The guy actually seemed a bit nutty to me. The motivation for the whole
endeavor was to demonstrate that his AI player (Chinook) was provably better
than an amazing human checkers player by the name of Marion Tinsley. In a
45-year career, the man never lost a World Championship match, and he only
ever lost 9 games (2 to Chinook). Do keep in mind that championship checkers
matches are 39 games, meaning that he played thousands and thousands of games.

Anyways, a PDF of his talk is available here:
<http://www.cs.potsdam.edu/sigcse07/schaefferTalk.pdf> . It was an interesting
story, even if I thought the presenter was a bit strange.

~~~
erik
I'm actually taking a class from Schaeffer at the moment. He is perhaps a bit
odd, but so far he seems to be a decent professor.

~~~
BrandonM
Oh, he seemed like a great guy. He just seemed to be overzealous to accomplish
a goal that really didn't seem (to me) to matter that much. When he said
something along the lines of "Marion Tinsley is human, and humans make
mistakes. Chinook will play perfectly after checkers is solved. Therefore,
Chinook is better than Tinsley," I could almost hear "mad scientist" laughter.

To me, a program that already knows the right answer and simply looks it up in
a database is much less interesting than a human who arrives at a similar
answer through reasoning and intuition, or even an AI program that uses
heuristics and some kind of internal scoring mechanism.

That's not even mentioning that I think a multi-year computation on something
like solving checkers is really a (nearly) useless endeavor. Whose lives will
be made better by this? Only in academia could such resources be directed at
something with no tangible end value. I guess it's an accomplishment for
Schaeffer, but to me it seems like anyone could throw a bunch of CPUs at a
program that iterates over all possible checkers positions. I just can't
imagine getting much satisfaction for such an accomplishment.

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mynameishere
They are still on book #79, "Mystery of the Sacred Stones", in the _Choose
Your Own Adventure_ series.

Science marches on...

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ivankirigin
Now they just need to prove an algorithm for optimal style.

