Related Research Articles
Marion Franklin Tinsley was an American mathematician and checkers player. He is considered to be the greatest checkers player who ever lived. Tinsley was world champion from 1955–1958 and from 1975–1991 and never lost a world championship match. He lost only seven games from 1950 until his death in 1995. He withdrew from championship play during the years 1958–1975, relinquishing the title during that time. Derek Oldbury, sometimes considered the second-best player of all time, thought that Tinsley was "to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what Michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music."
Checkers, also known as draughts, is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".
A solved game is a game whose outcome can be correctly predicted from any position, assuming that both players play perfectly. This concept is usually applied to abstract strategy games, and especially to games with full information and no element of chance; solving such a game may use combinatorial game theory and/or computer assistance.
Computer chess includes both hardware and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training. Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess grandmaster or higher are available on hardware from supercomputers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish, Leela Chess Zero, GNU Chess, Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms.
An evaluation function, also known as a heuristic evaluation function or static evaluation function, is a function used by game-playing computer programs to estimate the value or goodness of a position in a game tree. Most of the time, the value is either a real number or a quantized integer, often in nths of the value of a playing piece such as a stone in go or a pawn in chess, where n may be tenths, hundredths or other convenient fraction, but sometimes, the value is an array of three values in the unit interval, representing the win, draw, and loss percentages of the position.
International draughts is a strategy board game for two players, one of the variants of draughts. The gameboard comprises 10×10 squares in alternating dark and light colours, of which only the 50 dark squares are used. Each player has 20 pieces, light for one player and dark for the other, at opposite sides of the board. In conventional diagrams, the board is displayed with the light pieces at the bottom; in this orientation, the lower-left corner square must be dark.
Combinatorial game theory is a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science that typically studies sequential games with perfect information. Study has been largely confined to two-player games that have a position that the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition. Combinatorial game theory has not traditionally studied games of chance or those that use imperfect or incomplete information, favoring games that offer perfect information in which the state of the game and the set of available moves is always known by both players. However, as mathematical techniques advance, the types of game that can be mathematically analyzed expands, thus the boundaries of the field are ever changing. Scholars will generally define what they mean by a "game" at the beginning of a paper, and these definitions often vary as they are specific to the game being analyzed and are not meant to represent the entire scope of the field.
Jonathan Herbert Schaeffer is a Canadian researcher and professor at the University of Alberta and the former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
English draughts or checkers, also called straight checkers or simply draughts, is a form of the strategy board game checkers. It is played on an 8×8 checkerboard with 12 pieces per side. The pieces move and capture diagonally forward, until they reach the opposite end of the board, when they are crowned and can thereafter move and capture both backward and forward.
MTD(f) is an alpha-beta game tree search algorithm modified to use ‘zero-window’ initial search bounds, and memory (usually a transposition table) to reuse intermediate search results. MTD(f) is a shortened form of MTD(n,f) which stands for Memory-enhanced Test Driver with node ‘n’ and value ‘f’. The efficacy of this paradigm depends on a good initial guess, and the supposition that the final minimax value lies in a narrow window around the guess (which becomes an upper/lower bound for the search from root). The memory structure is used to save an initial guess determined elsewhere.
Don Lafferty (1933–1998) was a Grandmaster checkers player. In 1982 he defeated Derek Oldbury for the World GAYP championship with a score of 1-0-23. He was challenged for the championship in 1984 by Paul Davis, winning easily 5-0-15. In 1986 he defended his title again by drawing James Morrison with a score of 0-0-24 and in 1989 he defeated Elbert Lowder 4-3-16.
God's algorithm is a notion originating in discussions of ways to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle, but which can also be applied to other combinatorial puzzles and mathematical games. It refers to any algorithm which produces a solution having the fewest possible moves. The allusion to the deity is based on the notion that an omniscient being would know an optimal step from any given configuration.
Blondie24 is an artificial intelligence checkers-playing computer program named after the screen name used by a team led by David B. Fogel. The purpose was to determine the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence checkers-playing computer program.
SSS* is a search algorithm, introduced by George Stockman in 1979, that conducts a state space search traversing a game tree in a best-first fashion similar to that of the A* search algorithm.
Progress in artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the advances, milestones, and breakthroughs that have been achieved in the field of artificial intelligence over time. AI is a multidisciplinary branch of computer science that aims to create machines and systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Artificial intelligence applications have been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, economic-financial applications, robot control, law, scientific discovery, video games, and toys. However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore." "Many thousands of AI applications are deeply embedded in the infrastructure of every industry." In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI technology became widely used as elements of larger systems, but the field was rarely credited for these successes at the time.
Martin Bryant is a British computer programmer known as the author of White Knight and Colossus Chess, a 1980s commercial chess-playing program, and Colossus Draughts, gold medal winner at the 2nd Computer Olympiad in 1990.
In combinatorial game theory, a two-player deterministic perfect information turn-based game is a first-player-win if with perfect play the first player to move can always force a win. Similarly, a game is second-player-win if with perfect play the second player to move can always force a win. With perfect play, if neither side can force a win, the game is a draw.
Computer Othello refers to computer architecture encompassing computer hardware and computer software capable of playing the game of Othello. It was notably included in Microsoft Windows from 1.0 to XP, where it is simply known as Reversi.
Solving chess consists of finding an optimal strategy for the game of chess; that is, one by which one of the players can always force a victory, or either can force a draw. It is also related to more generally solving chess-like games such as Capablanca chess and infinite chess. In a weaker sense, solving chess may refer to proving which one of the three possible outcomes is the result of two perfect players, without necessarily revealing the optimal strategy itself.
Elbert Lowder was an American checkers champion noted for dominating the "11-man ballot". He worked as a piano tuner and was from North Carolina. As one of the grandmasters who played against the Chinook program he is mentioned several times in Jonathan Schaeffer's book One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers. Elbert Lowder was a member of the United Methodist Church.
References
- ↑ "1994 Chinook-Tinsley checkers match". Archived from the original on 2006-08-29.
- ↑ "Details of the 1995 Man vs. Machine World Championship".
- 1 2 Schaeffer, J.; Burch, N.; Y. Björnsson; Kishimoto, A.; Müller, M.; Lake, R.; Lu, P.; Sutphen, S. (2007). "Checkers is Solved" (PDF). Science. 317 (5844): 1518–22. Bibcode:2007Sci...317.1518S. doi:10.1126/science.1144079. PMID 17641166. S2CID 10274228.
- ↑ Schaeffer, J.; Björnsson, Y.; Burch, N.; Kishimoto, A.; Müller, M.; Lake, R.; Lu, P.; Sutphen, S. "Solving Checkers" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2005 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization.
- ↑ Schaeffer, Jonathan (1997). One Jump Ahead:: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers . Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-94930-7.
- ↑ "Chinook home page". 24 June 2003. Archived from the original on 2003-06-24.
- ↑ "Chinook home page". 30 September 2004. Archived from the original on 2004-09-30.