On Jul 20, 12:30 pm, Ron wrote:
In article .com,
help bot wrote:

To my mind, "solving" checkers would not simply
mean being able to handle any human or present
computer opponent without losing; 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. I suppose you would begin
with the simplest positions, and work backwards,
adding more and more for many years until one day,
your efforts suddenly hit a wall -- having tackled
every legal position and tallied the results.

They've done this.

Checkers is solved.


So why are there people here saying just the opposite?
Adding on qualifiers?

"Solved", to me, means that every legal position has a
known result, and that every legal move leads to another
position which has a known result, and every capture
yields a simpler position, with a known result. NOT just
having a computer which can't be beaten (like say, Rybka).

In chess, which has been worked on for many decades,
they max out at about only seven men on the board! Add
one lousy isolated, blockaded, worthless Rook-pawn, and
the program draws a complete blank, requiring human
intelligence to intervene (as with the Whitaker game, which
I knew was a win, though not an easy one).

At the beginning of a game of checkers, there are 24 men
on the board, but most of them are blocked and can't yet
move. If, when a man reached the last row it merely scored
a point and then was removed, this would be fairly simple,
but instead the darned things promote to Kings, which can
move backwards. So, you get repetitions of position (yeck).


-- help bot