A BBC article today notes that a group of Canadian researchers has programmed a computer so that it never loses the game of draughts (chequers) .

The researchers, based at the University of Alberta, began working on a program (Chinook) in the nineties using a heuristic approach with rules derived from expert draughts players.

This approach was successful - in that the Chinook program won the World Checkers Championship in 1994 - however it did still occassionally lose games.

So, they switched to a brute-force approach whereby they analyzed billions of possible game variations to calculate the best move in every situation. With this new approach the program can always play the best move in every situation and so are guaranteed to win - or draw if their opponent also plays perfectly.

Unless you’re a gamer you may not have noticed that the BBC missed a couple of the important aspects of the story.

The first of these is that draughts is a drawn game if played perfectly by both sides. This means that the advantage of moving first is insufficient to guarantee a win.

A second, related issue is that no one seems to have asked draughts players how they feel about this. Doesn’t it somehow take something away from their game by knowing that it has been ’solved’? And what of chess players whose game will now come under greater investigation?