A group of computer scientists from Canada said Thursday that they've managed to crack the "code" of the checkers board game so that a computer program can win or draw against any opponent, according to a story from the BBC.
Even though a computer program by the name of Chinook won the World's Checkers Championship in 1994, that software would lose the game occasionally.
The Canadian team, which was led by Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the department of computer science at the University of Alberta, said that checkers has been the most challenging game to beat because there are as many as 500 billion potential moves in the board game. According to an article published in the journal Science, it took an average of 50 computers almost 20 years to find the right solution to best a human competitor at every turn.
Next up for the team: chess. But that means taking on IBM's Deep Blue.
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