Big news today. My supervisor, Dr Jonathan Schaeffer had a major announcement concerning his checkers research. As some of you no doubt know, he is the author of the world champion checkers program, Chinook. Since winning the title he continued to work on the game, but instead of trying to play the game well, he concentrated on playing the game perfectly. Today he announced that the game is indeed a draw. The solution was finished in April, but he couldn't announce it right away since he submitted the solution to Science magazine. By submitting it there, he knew that it would get rejected immediately if Science wasn't able to be the ones to break the news. So it finally got published, and Jonathan was able to release the new web page with the playable solution! This comes at a crazy time for Jonathan, but the poker group should benefit from the press coverage since Jonathan has been careful to mention the upcoming man-machine poker match to every media person he talks to.

2 sleeps before I head to Vancouver!

Heraldk