Cracking the draughts code - Technology - smh.com.au

The perfect game of draughts ends as a draw, Canadian computer scientists reported on Thursday. The team at the University of Alberta said they had "solved" draughts, the 5000-year-old popular board game also known as chequers (or checkers). Their computer program, Chinook, spent more than 18 years playing out the 500 billion possible positions, they report in the journal Science. "This paper announces that checkers is now solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw," Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues wrote in their report. "That checkers is a draw is not a surprise; grandmaster players have conjectured this for decades."