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Drafty research

Devastating news comes this week from Canada, where the combination of a good education system and a lot of snow has resulted in a team of computer scientists solving the game of draughts. They analysed the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions, and came up with the best move in any circumstance.
Therefore, the computers involved should win or draw any game you play against them, unless you distract them and craftily whip their pieces off the board.
However, computers might be sick of the game, as they’ve been analysing draughts for about 20 years now to reduce a pleasurable pastime to nothing more than an instruction book.
‘This was a huge computational problem – more than a million times bigger than anything that had ever been solved before,’ Professor Jonathan Schaeffer told the BBC, which raises the question: ‘Why did you bother’?

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