Miscellany: Checkers has been solved, or "This book is pretty much worthless to me now"

Perfect information strategy games with no random elements are ideal fodder for computers. One of the greatest human talents, pattern recognition, is used every time a player evaluates a position, so these kinds of games provide good workouts for these algorithms. While there are some games that are so complex (Go, for example) that computers still lag far behind human beings, as of July 2007, checkers is not one of them.

This is sad, in a way, that there is no human being that can possibly beat this computer at checkers. I guess the next time I'm in a school playroom, I'll see the red and black checkerboard with some faint tinge of wistfulness for all the children who will play the game that isn't much of a game any more.

In one way, this discovery has already obsoleted the book "Win at Checkers," a neat little treasure trove of checkers strategy and trivia by Millard Hopper. I loved the author's quaint, almost idealistic belief that checkers could promote peace and brotherhood among men. The numerous diagrams and tactical puzzles remain in my mind, because checkers, among all the Western strategy games, is about controlled sacrifice of your own men.