It won’t lose any checker game for a thousand years from now on and it will at least obtain a draw in the company of any experienced player. Meet Chinook, a computer software that can calculate more than 39 trillion checker game positions in advance every time the game has up to 10 checkers on the board.

"The program can achieve at least a draw against any opponent, playing either the black or white pieces," the researchers say in this week's issue of online journal Science.

Although not quite a revolutionary discovery, the algorithms Chinook uses differ from the ones used by other software applications because of the approach scientists took when they built it. Chinook does not include the so called rules of thumb- which are right in most of the cases.

A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination.

"What we've done is show that you can take nontrivial problems, very large problems, and you can do the same kind of reasoning with perfection. There is no error in the Chinook result. ... Every decision point is 100 percent."

"Clearly ... the world is not going to be revolutionized" by this, said Jonathan Schaeffer, chairman of the department of computing science at the University of Alberta.

He also added that it doesn’t matter how players reach the level of 10 checkers on the board, from there Chinook cannot be defeated. A flawless player would at best obtain a draw in front of the software.

The checkers research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Alberta's provincial technology organization iCORE, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Western Canada Research Grid and the University of Alberta.