Checkers Solved

News that Checkers (aka "Draughts") has been solved by brute force computer analysis. I have a feeling that we're coming to the end of the era of long-lasting games that are based on complete, perfect information with no randomness. (Meaning that maybe games need to have incomplete, hidden information and/or randomness to avoid being completely solved.)

That said, maybe Chess is still safe for a while. I heard somewhere (lost the source, sorry) that if every particle in the universe could somehow be used to compute one operation per second and that all the particles in the universe were used in a massively parallel computer that analyzed all possible positions in Chess, it would take longer than the current estimated age of the universe to finish. So yeah, pretty long.

--Sirlin