"I think it's an astounding achievement," Levy told Discovery News. "Jonathan always knew how to do it, but he needed the computer power."
So what's next, chess? Not likely, says Schaeffer. At least not any time soon. Whereas checkers has a mere 500-billion-billion positions (5 followed by 20 zeroes), chess is though to have about a billion-trillion-trillion-trillion positions (1 followed by 45 zeroes).
"Given the effort required to solve checkers," Schaeffer reports, "chess will remain unsolved for a long time, barring the invention of new technology."
In the meantime, the lessons learned are expected to help in solving more practical problems with specific, desired outcomes in areas like bioinformatics, machine translation and even scheduling.
"This kind of brute force intelligence is a valid sort of tool to solve certain types of problems," said Murray Campbell, IBM Researcher at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. Murray is the co-developer of Deep Blue chess machine.
"This is not an approach that would occur naturally," Campbell said. It's entirely different from how the human mind or even Darwinian evolution solves problems, he said. "This is an exhaustive exploration of a space with an optimal solution." And once you find the solution, it's nailed for good, he said.
And that's the case for checkers, said Campbell: "I think it's a milestone."
