Some researchers spent the last 20 years trying to write a computer program that is unbeatable at checkers…and they just succeeded (see here). While this is interesting, I find the predictions in this article amusing. They are predicting that chess will take another 50 years to “crack”. Who actually wants to spend the next few decades trying to write an unbeatable chess program, one that always plays a perfect match? Hopefully, and I don’t know this, they are just waiting for computing power to reach a level capable of analyzing all the possible moves. Seems like something that would have been useful during the cold war…