Can you believe it, some computer scientists at the University of Alberta have worked out how to always win at Checkers (known in the UK as Draughts). To prove it they have created a Java applet which can play you and will always win.
Checkers has a search space of 5×10^20 (ie 5 followed by 20 0s) i.e. 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moves. Compared to chess of course that is miniscule but it is a million times larger than Connect four.
This was a project that started in 1989 and an earlier version of the program won the World Checkers competition in 1994. Though it is a fairly trivial task- the research itself will have many uses. Other games that may get ’solved’ in the future will include Othello (also known as Reversi) and Poker.
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