Originally published in Science Express on 19 July 2007
Science 14 September 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1518 - 1522
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144079
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
Research Articles
Checkers Is Solved
Jonathan Schaeffer,* Neil Burch, Yngvi Björnsson, Akihiro Kishimoto,
Martin Müller, Robert Lake, Paul Lu, Steve Sutphen
The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5
x 1020). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a
game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989,
almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving
checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to
the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved:
Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging
popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times as complex as
Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate
strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as Deep Blue for chess.
Solving a game takes this to the next level by replacing the heuristics
with perfection.
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2E8, Canada.
Present address: Department of Computer Science, Reykjavik University,
Reykjavik, Kringlan 1, IS-103, Iceland.
Present address: Department of Media Architecture, Future University,
Hakodate, 116-2 Kamedanakano-cho Hakodate Hokkaido, 041-8655, Japan.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
[email protected]
