Checkers Solved, Unbeatable Database Created

tgeller writes "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."'"

Comments

CmdrTaco

[cheese_lord]

Anyone who wants to see CmdrTaco loss terrible should hop on over to table 17.

Re:Wow.

[krelian]

So if this system is really "unbeatable", what happens if you set it up to play against itself? They still haven't managed to make the system beat itself but that is understandable since all their resources are now going towards developing an algorithm to stop first post hijackers.