BIGJOE

zenpoet

DBNull

Tic-tac-toe also has a solution. If you go first, you can always win or draw. If you go second, you can always draw. It's trivial to calculate in maybe a few minutes these solutions.

That's what the meaning of term "the game is solved" really means - that you can play a legal game (i.e., no cheating or alternate rules), and come up with a matching move that will either guarantee a draw or a victory (the former if both play a perfect game, the latter if the other person makes a mistake).

Checkers, while having easier rules than Chess, actually is harder to solve. It turns out that a victory in checkers relies on getting a tiny advantage (because your opponent makes a mistake). In chess, if you make a mistake, there is still a possibly of a recovery, while in checkers, once you gain the slight advantage, the odds are heavily tilted in that you'll win - i.e., unless you do something completely stupid, there's no way for your opponent to win.

The search space for chess is larger due to the rules, but people are interested in solving that as well (to answer the question - does white always win in a perfect game, or does it always end in a draw?).

Go's search space is much larger than that of chess. The only way to make progress is via AI. But Tic-tac-toe and now checkers doesn't need an AI to be "good".

Worf

Jesse in Japan

Disagree. That's where artificial INTELLIGENCE still lags behind real STUPIDITY.

strangepork

The-Spectre

SexCpotatoes

Lorticon

Tay

Don't hate me, you knew somebody was going to say something inane like this. >:3

lumpydog

Hellslinger

rcarydon

And, actually, on that note, there's an error in this article. They didn't analyze all 500 billion billion checkers moves. Instead, they only had the computer calculate until it found a winning move for each possible game state. Because of this, only 1 out of every 5 million possible moves were analyzed.

This is all according to the article in Nature, wherein the researchers announced that they had solved the game of checkers. For those keeping score, the researchers involved speculate that it will be another 50 or 60 years before chess is "solved" in a similar fashion. Who knows how long until there's an unbeatable Go AI.

mikemcauley

Pinkmeister

Cursemaster0

chemicalfish

looks like it was freshly (and factually!) updated after all! impressive!

x23

Checkers isn't as complicated as chess.

To put it another way, that's like saying that someday, a human will figure out how to beat a computer at Tic-Tac-Toe. It simply won't happen because the game is too simple. There is no clever strategy the human to use to fool the computer.

With this computation, checkers has become as trivial for a computer to beat as Tic-Tac-Toe.

Gannoc

Catalyst

frostoy

Kohono

Cursemaster0