We thought for today's column we'd try something new; namely, publish a checker problem composed by one of the better artificial intelligence (AI) engines. So we got on to one of them--- although we won't mention the name, it's by far the most well known--- and gave it a try.

It was a real learning experience.

We started out by asking it to compose a problem for 8x8 Anglo-American checkers. It happily did so, putting pieces on both the light and dark squares, and then offering to compose more difficult problems. We went through two more iterations and got the same sort of thing.

We then explicity told it to only put pieces on the dark squares (something it had previously told us it was doing, but it wasn't). Same result. We admonished it again. It came back with a problem and a solution that made no sense. For one thing the pieces were either (a) moving in the wrong direction, or (b) it was just fine to have an uncrowned man on the last row.

Tom Wiswell

After this we asked for sources of checker puzzles. It gave a few, with mixed accuracy; some of the websites cited didn't feature problems and the same was true of the referenced books. (It did give a pointer to our site, which was surprising but nice.) The engine also casually mentioned Tom Wiswell and offered to compose a Wiswell-style problem. Alas, that was a bust too, as again it confused movement directions and spewed out something that made no sense.

That was enough for us, and for today's column we turned back the clock to something well over a hundred years before AI and AI hype was ever even heard of, to select a nice problem by an honest to goodness human, who knew orders of magnitude more about composing checker problems than the best AI today seems to know.

WHITE

BLACK
Black to Play and Win

B:W8,10,18,K21:B3,12,K20,27

It's a nice problem, neither too hard nor too easy, which can be readily solved with your natural intelligence. Blow a raspberry at AI and solve this one, and then click on Read More to check your solution.

Solution

12-16* 8-4---A 3-8* 4x11 20-24* 11x20 27-32* 20x27 32x7 Black Wins with the opposition.

A---As published. 18-14 is the computer move, dropping a piece to prolong the ending. Such are the ways of computers.

Today's problem was composed by one E. Bacon (a real human) and appeared long ago as #802 in Gould's Problems, Critical Positions, and Games, 3rd Edition.

kebabette CC BY-NC-SA 2.0