Two Interesting Things

So, I found this article on Slashdot about how they have solved checkers. Two things caught my eye here.

1) There are 500 billion billion different arrangements of the game. That's why it's taken so long to solve. Now, the team only worked through 1/5,000,000 of those moves, since a lot of the losing ones can just be ignored. Anyway, it just doesn't seem like checkers is that complicated on the surface. I was surprised that there were that many possibilities. I would have guessed that it had already been solved. I mean, all the pieces are identical and you have very limited move possibilities. And you only use half the board. It's not like it's Go or something (where the computers blow).

2) The team that did this research was led by snot rocketeer "Jonathan Schaeffer."

- Seth