“Are you the devil?”

Schaeffer on his long history with Chinook and checkers:

A human playing 64 steps ahead in rollouts?

Checkers nightmares?

Chinookitis?

500 billion billion positions.  The number of shotglasses of water in the Pacific Ocean.  Around 10^20.

You can milk this for dozens of papers.  You know what? I wanted to solve checkers and write one paper.

1989-2005 solving positions, up to 200 computers

250 gb worth of compressed data

The 197 year position

“Over 20 years I can’t have a single bit be wrong…” 9 years of wasted computation because of one corrupted byte.

If neither side makes a mistake, checkers ends in a draw.

Psychic “checkers is done moment.”