"help bot" wrote in message
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On Jul 23, 4:10 pm, Guy Macon http://www.guymacon.com/ wrote:




, but the
|unfinished match against Dr. Tinsley left lingering doubt whether
|Chinook could claim to be the best of all time.
|
|The new research proves that Chinook is invincible in traditional
|checkers. In most tournament play, however, a match now starts with
|three moves chosen at random. In solving the traditional game, the
|researchers have also solved 21 of the 156 three-move openings,
|leaving some hope for humans.


There it is. How on earth can it be possible to
solve 21 out of 156 checkers openings instead of
156 out of 156 UNLESS they have not really
solved checkers completely?

Because you can force a draw without reaching
the positions that they haven't calculated.

seem to explain the strange comments posted
here earlier, which suggested the same thing by
misusing the term solved to mean partly-solved.


In traditional checkers, also called
Go As You Please (GAYP), any
legal move is possible. The version of
the game that starts from one of 156
positions selected at random and has
not (yet) been solved. In fact, the
openings contained in the proof are
not the best in practical play.



I think the conclusion is that these guys are
confident that no human or computer will ever
beat their machine from now on, and are moving
on, satisfied with less than perfection.


No. Checkers has been understood to
be a draw for at least a century, and computers
have been unbeatable for ~10. What has been
done here is to document the path from starting
position to draw. So GAYP is a proven draw.