Canadian researchers report they have "solved" checkers, developing a program that cannot lose in a game popular with young and old alike for more than a thousand years.

"The [Chinook] program can achieve at least a draw against any opponent, playing either the black or white pieces," the researchers say in this week's online edition of the journal Science.

Source:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070719...

Here's an abstract of the Science article:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conte...

"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 more complex than 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."

The Chinook Checkers Supercomputer which did the work:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/

While you're there, why not try your hand PLAYING against Chinook?!?

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/...

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?ar...

=== begin quoted passage ===

July 19, 2007

Computers Solve Checkers—It's a Draw

King me! Top computer scientist proves perfect play leads to draw, recounts battle for world championship, gets kinged

By JR Minkel

Jonathan Schaeffer's quest for the perfect game of checkers has ended. The 50-year-old computer scientist from the University of Alberta in Edmonton left human players in the dust more than a decade ago after a trial by fire against the greatest checkers champion in history.

And now, after putting dozens of computers to work night and day for 18 years—jump, jump, jump—he says he has solved the game—king me!. "The starting position, assuming no side makes a mistake, is a draw," he says.

Schaeffer's proof, described today in Science ... would make checkers the most complex game yet solved by machines, beating out the checker-stacking game Connect Four in difficulty by a factor of a million....

"It's a milestone," says Murray Campbell, a computer scientist at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., and co-inventor of the chess program Deep Blue. "He's stretched the state of the art."

Although technological limits prohibit analyzing each of the 500 billion billion possible arrangements that may appear on an eight-by-eight checkerboard, Schaeffer and his team identified moves that guaranteed the game would end in a draw no matter how tough the competition.

Like any complicated mathematical proof, the result will have to withstand scrutiny. But "it's close to 100 percent," says computer scientist Jaap van den Herik of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who has seen the details. "He has never published anything that was not completely true."

Opening Play: Walking a Precipice

Schaeffer's odyssey began in the late 1980s. He had written a top chess program but IBM was on the verge of pouring its far vaster resources into Deep Blue. "I like to be competitive," he says, so he turned his attention elsewhere. "I naively thought I could solve the game of checkers," he recalls. "You can teach somebody the rules in a minute."

Setting out in 1989 with 16 megabytes of computer memory, he quickly found that checkers, like chess, was too rich with possible positions to dash off a solution. So he switched gears, vowing to topple legendary checkers champion Marion Tinsley, who had lost only three games in tournament play since 1950.

In 1992 Schaeffer's program Chinook took on Tinsley, who had resigned as world champion when the American Checker Federation and English Draughts Association temporarily refused to sanction the man-computer matchup.

Tinsley was so good that his opponents played dull games in the hope of securing at least a draw, according to Schaeffer; Chinook apparently put the magic back in the game for the champ. "It played brash, aggressive moves—it walked on the edge of a precipice," Scheaffer anthropomorphizes. "It would do things people looked at and said, 'Man, is that program crazy?'"

The program actually beat Tinsley twice, but computer glitches led to a forfeit that gave the human a 3–2 lead with two games left in a best-of-40 match. Schaeffer set Chinook on an aggressive course to try to recoup, resulting in another loss for the computer that cost it and its creator the match, Schaeffer recounted in his book One Jump Ahead....

=== end quoted passage ===

-- Drew McDermott, Yale

True, or just another <Odd Lie>

If someone were to predict that 1) nearly all of the serious problems facing Humankind will be solved within the coming century (largely by means of advanced technology), and 2) YOU may be able to extend your lifespan to 200+ years (!!!) -- it would be tempting to dismiss that person as a wild-eyed dreamer.

But if that person had an established and very impressive track record of predicting the future (at least of advanced technology), and that person had actively contributed (in a major way) to the very technology that helped shape that future, it might be interesting to listen.

Such a person is Ray Kurzweil.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, "Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book ["The Singularity is Near"] envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend it's biological limitations -- transforming our lives in ways we can't yet imagine."

Kurzweil refers to an era he calls "the Singularity" that is fast approaching: "The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today -- the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity."

Here is the website Dr. Kurzweil has established for the book "The Singularity is Near":

http://www.singularity.com/

[continued below...]

And here is a timeline of many of his future predictions, all the way from the present to the year 2099 (including the prediction that "The concept of 'life expectancy' has become irrelevant to humans and machines thanks to medical immortality...") [Presented at Wikipedia, and subject to all the limitations of that amazing yet not-perfect user-edited resource]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_ku...

At the website devoted to his book "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever", we find, "Immortality is within our grasp . . .In 'Fantastic Voyage', high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme life-extending and life-enhancing technologies-- now in development--become available. This bridge to the future will enable those who dare to make the journey from this century to the next . . . and beyond."

http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/

Their website devoted to health and life extension:

http://www.rayandterry.com/

And here's a bit more about Dr. Kurzweil:

http://www.singularity.com/aboutray...

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_ku...

Dr. Kurzweil's companies:

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/

Two interesting videos of Dr. Kurzweil:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3C...

at Stanford University:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9PWXrnsS...

I would certainly love to believe that Dr. Kurzweil's vision of the future is accurate. However, I am not persuaded by his writing that such a future is ensured or even likely -- but I do believe something like it is *possible* (provided we keep it from taking a distinctly dystopian turn).

Even so, I find it worthwhile (as well as entertaining!) to explore his ideas -- with a mixture of skepticism, enthusiasm, concern, and hope....

[P.S. I am not affiliated with Dr. Kurzweil or any of his companies in any way. I just present these references here since I think many people might find his ideas interesting. (For those who are familiar with the writings of such thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, Ken Wilbur, and others, it seems to me that Dr. Kurzweil arrives at a similar mystical or quasi-mystical (techno-mystical?) destination to that envisioned by these thinkers, though "up from below" (as it were) instead of "down from above" (as in the case of these other "process" philosophers.) ]

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

" I just think we should look at this as a chess match between the world's greatest chess player, and Garry Kasparov. "

-- Lou Gerstner (IBM Chairman)

<In this position Deep Blue played 23. Rec1; this is a very human-like move. My fritz for example doesn't even take it seriously.>

23. Rec1 may be an artifact of that tuning as well...the computer saw that the c file may open?

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk...

=== begin quoted text ===

IBM 360/195 playing chess, November 1974, probably in the world computer chess championships. MASTER Team, from left: Alex Bell, Peter Kent, John Birmingham, John Waldron (a British chess player)...

No details are offered in the 1974 report; it appears that the machine is playing someone at a remote location, linked by telephone. According to the report, “The only major hardware change made to the IBM System 195 Central Computer during 1974 was the addition in March of a third megabyte of main core. The system has now given consistently high performance for a period of three years and from this experience it is now possible to predict its maximum capability when fully loaded.”

=== end quoted text ===

http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/200...

" In the past Grandmasters came to our computer tournaments to laugh. Today they come to watch. Soon they will come to learn. "

http://tinyurl.com/297gcuk

or

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

While I suspect that TRILLIONS is an overestimate, I certainly believe it is greatly in the interest of any economy to have a free flow of information, and such information significantly enhances productivity. Striking that balance between freedom to use information and a strong incentive-structure in which innovation (via copyright, among other things) is rewarded is no small challenge -- and I suspect many of these issues (in the U.S.) will ultimately be thrashed out in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In any case, I suspect that nations and economies that respect openness to a very significant degree will always have economic advantages over those that do not. The limited access to information of nations like North Korea or (to a lesser degree) China will, other things being equal, be a substantial drag on their productivity and economic vitality.

Incidentally, Ars Technica's "Law & Disorder" page for legal matters surrounding technology is often interesting:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/

More about "fair use" and associated copyright issues, courtesy of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Hope you are all in good spirits....

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2010/051...