help bot wrote:
To my mind, "solving" checkers would not simply mean being able to
handle any human or present computer opponent without losing;

They've done much more than that! They've demonstrated that the game
can be held to a draw against any possible opponent.


instead, I want to have every legal checkers position scored as a
win/loss/draw, by calculating every simpler position that can arise
from it and so forth; like the endgame tablebases in chess.

That is a slightly stronger condition and I'm not sure exactly what
the UAlberta guys have done. At the very least, they can tell you
whether any position that can be reached from the initial position
according to the replies they would make is a win, loss or draw. (In
chess terms, if their computer would play 1.d4 all the time, it might
not be able to tell you about unreachable positions such as that after
1.e4.)


Although checkers uses a similar board to chess, only half the
squares are actually used; critically, since every man moves and
captures the same way (until a promotion at least), this should be
much easier than solving chess. Also, many of the possible moves of
a random checker will be blocked, reducing further the possible
legal moves.

Yes, checkers is very, very much simpler than chess. But it's still a
pretty complex game and far more complex than anything that's been
solved before.


I am wondering whether they really "solved" the game or, as the
chosen language suggests, they merely succeeded in never losing in
practice.

They're claiming in scientific journals that they've solved it.
Nobody publish that claim if all they'd done was produce a very very
strong engine.


Dave.

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