So the game of draughts has finally been solved by a computer. After 20 years of brute force computer program calculations, a Canadian team have now played from the 500 billion billion Draughts positions and proven that white or black can always at least draw against any opposition, even if it is perfect.
Quite an achievement.
I’ve always wondered if it is possible for a computer program to always beat a human at Chess. It happened a few years ago when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov, but that program uses a mixture of database play and algorithms to make it’s moves, so it’s only as good as the algorithms and thus difficult to be proven as a perfect player.
However, the Draughts brute force ‘proof’ has solved this question for me. Chess has much more complex move possibilities than Draughts and it turns out that today, there are around a billion billion billion billion billion possible positions, so a computer proof is not achieveable right now.
But I believe it does show that, in thoery, perfect play is possible. Whether that means that black would always be able to draw, I don’t know, that’s for someone else to work out and for me, it’s not really the point.
So where does that leave Chess as a sport? Well, humans are not perfect so there is still a challenge. You could make a machine to run 100 metres, but that doesn’t mean that human 100M sprint is any less valid. Really, I guess that the use of computers to play chess is really an interesing aside for those that way inclined.
I wish I’d had more time to play Chess. (Along with so many other interests I’ve come across over time.) I suppose that’s one for retirement…
