It’s old news, but in July, the Chinook team announced on Science Magazine that they improved their draughts playing software to the point it won’t lose a single game.

What does this mean? Well, basically it means that it’s mathematically proven that a game without mistakes can’t end in anything else than a draw.

It took 18 years, and a discrete amount of computation to get to this conclusion.

I picked up on the net and on the media a great deal of criticism about this news. It’s ok. People love to criticize. I do that A LOT ;)

The main complaint is “Couldn’t they spend 18 years doing something useful instead?“. I smile to this kind of objection.

What’s so special about games? Why people spend hours figuring out algorithms to solve efficiently the Hanoi Tower, or the Canadian Traveller Problem (”Problema del commesso viaggiatore” for the Italians).

A game is nothing else than a model. You crack the model, and you cracked the reality that maps to that model. “What’s the point in studying the best path in a connected graph”, someone could have asked 50 years ago. Then the Internet came around. And routing problems.

I must admit I was a bit disappointed reading the editorial of the August issue of “Newton“, an Italian scientific paper magazine (yes! I read on paper! :-) ). The director, Giorgio Rivieccio, judge the research “a waste” and “something to be archived, and forgotten in a closet forever”. He adds that the prospective of a “universe”, like the draught universe, where nothing is left to discover “depresses” him. And thanks that life is much more complex than a draughts game.

Maybe he just wanted to be poetic, with the comparison between life and a game. But the tone is not what I would expect in an editorial of a science magazine.

Stay tuned, more to come.

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