I am building a website for a wildland firefighting company. I’ve worked for this company the past two summers. It’s looking really nice so far.

http://myfirecrew.com 

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Apparently some people have spent a lot of time creating a database of all the possible checkers moves in an 8×8 board. This was previously an unsolved problem. “The program has been improved enough to where it cannot lose a game.”

“This 8×8 variant of draughts (the English name for checkers) was weakly solved on April 29, 2007 by the team of Jonathan Schaeffer, known for Chinook, the “World Man-Machine Checkers Champion”. From the standard starting position, both players can guarantee a draw with perfect play.”

“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.”

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