Almost twenty years ago a process was started that culminated in the recent announcement that the game of checkers (or ‘draughts’) can now be played flawlessly by computer. The technique is a brute-force attack, and so now there is a computer somewhere storing every single possible combination of pieces and able to work out the optimum next move in every scenario.

It turns out that the ‘best’ result will be a draw. It might not like look tic-tac-toe, but when you have mapped the complexity out enough, it is eventually just as futile. It’s going to take the computation and storage of 10²⁰ more positions than checkers took, but within a few decades we should have the computing ability to map out every possible game of chess. My prediction on that: white will always win if both sides play flawlessly.

Ron Evans predicts that 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…”

“Only a matter of time” is a lovely prediction to lob into conversation. Sure, it’s only a matter of time. It could be 15,000 years mind, but we’re in no hurry…

I’m sceptical about this happening any time soon, simply because the entropy of the natural World is so vast and immense that it makes a chess game look like child’s play. Sure, us humans might have a problem understanding the size and scope of every conceivable move in chess, but compared to every conceivable possibility within the World around us, it’s nothing.

There are however, interesting applications we can start to conceive of now. Game theory has been abused by war-mongers in the Rand corporation to the point it no longer has any real credibility, but if the flaws are removed, it’s possible for computers to start finding new theories we had not yet considered. The impact within systems that are bound by rules and predictable behaviour (currency trading, for example) could be huge.

What really intrigued me however was something the creators of the ultimate checkers program had to create as a byproduct of their work. The limitations of current hardware meant they had to get innovative about how they actually stored all of those possible positions:

“For example, they stored the outcomes for the 39 trillion possible positions for endgames in a mere 237 gigabytes of computer-storage space, an average of 154 positions per byte. The mathematicians are now applying these techniques to bioinformatics, looking for ways to manage the massive quantity of data generated by the sequencing of genomes.”

We’re delving into work where the storage requirements are becoming immense, and the last decade of having “enough” storage for most work meant we didn’t need to get creative around storage and search algorithms. The future is perhaps not about taking generic algorithms and applying them to our data, but finding new mathematical models of representing what we need to and creating domain-specific algorithms.

The singularity might be a way off, but finding a way of getting there is going to be intellectually stimulating, regardless.