[FOM] Checkers is a draw

[Timothy Y. Chow]

Jonathan Schaeffer and his collaborators have announced that their program 
Chinook has verified that checkers is a draw.  Their Science magazine 
article is available online to subscribers at:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1144079v1

The results of the computation have been placed online at:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook

Note that perfect play from an *arbitrary* given position (as opposed to 
the standard initial position) has been computed only for positions with 8 
or fewer units.  If work on checkers continues, then it seems plausible to 
me that we might see the day when Chinook plays perfectly from *any* given 
position.  If that happens, I suspect Chinook will play by computing on 
the fly rather than by querying a stored database, for the reasons I've 
given in recent FOM messages.

Tim