![]() Thereafter, Chinook equaled or bested all of its opponents until its retirement in 1997, the same year that IBM’s chess-playing Deep Blue computer beat reigning world champion Gary Kasparov to far greater fanfare.Īlthough chess-playing programs have consistently beaten the best players in the world since Deep Blue’s triumph, they cannot claim the invincible status of Chinook. It was the first time a computer program had won a human world championship, a feat recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records. Chinook lost 4 to 2 with 33 draws in that title match, but won the 1994 rematch by default when Tinsley withdrew due to illness after six draws. ![]() In 1992, the computer won the right to challenge the reigning checkers world champion, Marion Tinsley, widely considered the best player ever. Each of those pieces, he said, represents a possible checkers position.ĭespite the daunting task, Chinook earned some early triumphs for its creators. “The whole strategy in solving a game is to shrink that middle part until it disappears, so your beginning game and your end game connect,” Littman said.Īrriving at the right solution, Schaeffer said, was akin to accurately mapping out a grid covering Earth’s surface, where every square inch is divided into 1,000 pieces. The final challenge was to forge tight links between the game’s start and finish. Next, the team built a database of beginning moves that would eventually lead players to the endgame. In building the database, the program assembled the 39 trillion pieces of information needed to determine all possible outcomes when 10 or fewer checkers remain on the board. With assistance from some of the world’s best checkers players, Schaeffer and his team introduced rules of thumb into their massive computer program and then allowed it to capture information about winning and losing moves, tweaking it along the way. Chinook was not designed to “think” through all permitted strategies on its own but to memorize the consequences of every possible move, allowing it map out a start-to-finish strategy that would, at worst, result in a draw. ![]() But by beating “anything that could possibly play the game,” he said, Chinook stands out as a significant mathematical accomplishment to boot.Ĭheckers - or draughts, as the game is known in Britain - is played on a board of 64 dark and light squares, though each opponent’s 12 game pieces are allowed to move only diagonally along the dark squares. Littman, who has designed a computer program to complete crossword puzzles, said creating a program that can beat any human competitor may be a sociologically important landmark. Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., said Schaeffer’s checkers program had succeeded in “not just taking on the best human being, but taking on the game itself.” More tangibly, the work could ramp up artificial intelligence and parallel computing know-how and lessen the load for other programs trying to sift through vast DNA databases or produce machine-assisted language translations. The new achievement, led by the University of Alberta’s Jonathan Schaeffer, has been likened by other scientists to scaling Mount Everest. In doing so, its programmers say the newly crowned checkers king has solved the most challenging game yet cracked by a machine - even outdoing the chess-playing wizardry of IBM’s Deep Blue. Chinook, created by computer scientists from the University of Alberta in 1989, wrapped up its work less than three months ago.
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