How Checkers Was Solved

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/marion-tinsley-checkers/534111/?single_page=true

by panic • 9 years ago

158 35 9 years ago

kevinwang• 9 years ago

That was one of the greatest stories I've ever heard

viblo• 9 years ago

If you like this story I suggest you take a look at the book "One Jump Ahead" by Schaeffer for a lot more in depth view!

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u• 9 years ago

There's also Blondie24[0], which's got a pretty humorous backstory to its namesake.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838/

lmm• 9 years ago

You might like The Master of Go - humans, but a similar arc of the master in fading health facing an opponent for whom the game means something quite different.

WalterGR• 9 years ago

I had no idea that there was once a real-life incident reminiscent of the film War Games!

[Solving chess] took Schaeffer harnessing computers all over the world, drawing on and expanding his expertise in parallel computing. He conscripted machines everywhere from Switzerland to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a major Department of Energy facility that often deals with nuclear weapons.

“There was somebody else there [running a program] called BOMB and I was running checkers programs,” Schaeffer told me. “It was a very strange situation. Security should have been concerned.” And they were. They paid him a visit after discovering gigabytes of data flowing out of a national lab to Edmonton, Alberta.

(edit: add the remainder of the second paragraph.)

trm42• 9 years ago

Awesome story and well written.

jpeanuts2• 9 years ago

A truly fascinating story. I recall reading another version with an additional detail: after Checkers was solved Schaeffer evaluated every recorded game Tinsley had played in his life - and determined that there were only a handful of moves that he ever made in competition that were not perfect (in the sense of perfect play). The vast majority of the time, if you were playing Tinsley, you literally could not possibly win.

blahedo• 9 years ago

It's good, really, that this article focussed on Tinsley. I saw a talk by Schaeffer about ten years ago, just as he was finishing up solving checkers, and it was an astonishingly depressing talk. He invested his whole life—decades—as I recall his marriage failed partially as a result of his obsession with this—on what, in the end, was a lookup table. There was a lot of neat engineering he had to do along the way (storage, parallel work) but that's not what he cared about: he cared that he had solved checkers. Were there any insights about patterns that could be induced, maybe to teach humans how to do analysis or to learn some interesting mathematical fact about the graph structure of the board? No—you just see what the board state is, and look it up in the database to tell you the next move. I can't even tell you how demotivational this speech was.

Pulcinella• 9 years ago

Sometimes I fear that this will be the end result of brain research. A vast table that says: when these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means happiness. When these neurons are activated in this pattern, it means the brain is perceiving a tree.

We will understand the brain and consciousness and it will be completely unenlightening... :(

degenerate• 9 years ago

There's no way to map "what is the meaning of life?" to a table, so you'll never have that problem. As long as our universe and existence isn't 100% solved, the human brain will never be solved!

soVeryTired• 9 years ago

Ignoramus et ignorabimus?

kingraoul3• 9 years ago

That kind of understanding has a philosophical limit to what it can describe though - consider that an alien being, with an alien physiology would still experience what we would call pain, without the c-fibers firing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

jpeanuts2• 9 years ago

Your story suggests value in another article focussing on the personalities of Tinsley and Schaeffer. Both obsessives, both pre-eminent in their domain, but in quite different ways - and with different consequences on the rest of their lives. Tinsley's variety of obsession seems much healthier than Schaeffer's.

bwanab• 9 years ago

Back in my college days I had a summer job as an intern at a maximum security psychiatric hospital. My main ward was the admittance ward which was essentially where men accused of a crime were evaluated if their fitness to stand trial was in question. However, there was this one 20 something who had been there for years. He was accused of a horrific crime and had been diagnosed with an IQ of 65. This kid loved to play checkers. I started playing with him and over the course of the summer probably played 100 or so games with him. He beat me the first 50 or so times I played him and my assessment was that he had every possible board setup memorized and knew the right move for each of them. Whenever I made a mistake, he capitalized instantaneously. After the 50th or so game, I had memorized enough setups that I could split games with him.

dargopolis• 9 years ago

Having read Jonathan Schaeffer’s great book One Jump Ahead, I couldn’t help feeling that this article was a (well-written) book report which just barely mentions its primary source. Nice summary, but read the original. I haven’t read the second edition which apparently includes the follow-up story of solving the game, but I found the first edition very compelling. I wonder if the reporter was following the recent Deepmind/U of Alberta news and then came across the checkers story. Disclaimer: I was in Jonathan’s compiler course 30 years ago, prior to Chinook.

joshvm• 9 years ago

A great recent documentary on Checkers is King Me (trailer here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh8wyKabQiY). I say that as someone who is terrible at the game and doesn't enjoy playing it.

One of the players it features is Ron King, who is currently one of the strongest Checkers players. He holds the record for playing (and beating) 385 people simultaneously, though I believe he was beaten by Tinsley. Also his trash talking is fantastic.

Houshalter• 9 years ago

There is a fantastic story on the first checkers AI here: http://relprime.com/chinook/

How Checkers Was Solved

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