Eventually The Machines Will Win

I have never been a big checkers fan. Good thing, cause I would have had to give up the game after the recent "solution" of the game by a team of Canadian computer scientists. Every possible move of every possible game has been mapped, and a checkers playing program can take each of these into account before deciding on its next move. No human player has such ability.

Actually, as it turns out, the best possible outcome in a game of checkers, given two players who each make perfect moves, is a draw.

The next game to be solved will likely be othello, than other even more complex games like chess, which has 10²⁰ more possible moves than checkers.

It is only a matter of time before sufficient computing power allows the machines to contemplate eventualities of which we have not even postulated the existence.

The Singularity IS coming...

Become An Initiate Of The Bayesian Conspiracy

Jeff Atwood at the Coding Horror blog links to a great introduction to Bayes' Theorem.

If indeed as has been claimed "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," we should all be well versed in the work of the mysterious Reverend Bayes...

I have been playing around intermittently with an interesting application of Bayesian classification for a couple of years. Perhaps this will inspire me to actually finish it up enough to put it up on the web.