A team of computer scientists and top-level checkers players have "solved" the game of checkers. Using various heuristics, and on an average of 50 computers a day, the team went through 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 different checkers positions, and has now developed a computer which plays "perfect" checkers. It can not lose. If you play perfectly as well, you can play to a draw. The project is called Chinook, and it has been an ongoing project since 1989.

For more information (and to play) see:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook...ghts_player%29