Canada’s unbeatable chequers champion
p2pnet news | games:- A computer programme that won’t merely beat you at chequers some of the time, but all of the time? But only if you want it to?
That’s Chinook, say its creators, a team of Canadians from the University of Alberta.
The project began in 1989 and in 1990, the programme became the first to win the right to play for a human World Championship.
It lost in 1992, but won in 1994, a feat recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, and, “By 1996, it became clear that the program was much stronger than any human,” says the University.
Upshot? Chinook was retired. Humans didn’t stand a chance against it.
Say the researchers:
Checkers has a search space of 5×1020, a daunting number.
Almost continuously since 1989 (with a gap in the 1997 to 2001 period), dozens of computers have been working around the clock to solve the game.
On April 29, 2007, we were pleased to announce that checkers is now solved. From the standard starting position, Black (who moves first) is guaranteed a draw with perfect play. White (moving second) is also guaranteed a draw, regardless of what Black plays as the opening move.
Checkers is the largest game that has been solved to date, more than one million times larger than Connect Four and 100 million times larger than Awari.
Along the way, the Chinook project produced numerous research publications. Chinook’s winning of the World Man-Machine Championship (three years before the Deep Blue chess match) was a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence research.
Think you can take Chinook on? Try it. And to give you a chance, the team has watered it down.
“This program does not include the solution to checkers,” says the UofA computer science department.
“If you are good enough, you might even win!” 
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