Checkers

The Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta solved checkers.

Checkers has a search space of 5×10 to the 20th power. That is a really, really big number. How big? 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 possible board configurations. From 1989, dozens of computers were put at work to solve the game. And in April of 2007, they solved checkers.

The computer program cannot lose, resulting in either a victory or a draw. I guess the American Checker Federation won’t stage any more human-computer matches.

You can learn about the Chinook project here.