Programme unbeatable at draughts

Computer scientists have announced that after 18 years they have solved the board game draughts.

Scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada have built a computer program called Chinook, that has sifted through 500 billion billion positions and claimed that it is unbeatable. It creators said that the program will either win or draw every game, every time.

Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the university’s computer science department, began work on the Chinook system back in 1989 in order to win the World Draughts/Checkers Championships. Chinook won for the first time in 1994, becoming the first computer program to win any kind of human world championship. It stayed champion until 1997 when it was retired.

Schaeffer restarted the project in 2001and with the help of top draughts players he reprogrammed Chinook’s software using heuristics to capture good and bad moves. The program ran for years, backed by 50-200 computers every day, calculating billions of moves.

The finished program is now a database that knows the best move to play in any situation.

“I think we've raised the bar - and raised it quite a bit - in terms of what can be achieved in computer technology and artificial intelligence,” said Schaeffer. “We've taken the knowledge used in artificial intelligence applications to the extreme by replacing human-understandable heuristics with perfect knowledge. It's an exciting demonstration of the possibilities that software and hardware are now capable of achieving.”

You can try beating Chinook for yourself here.