Conquering checkers, and then the world

So a computer can beat us every single time at checkers, eh? To someone who is routinely humiliated at the game by her 9-year-old son, this is not such threatening news.

A national story says Canadian researchers finally identified and then countered every possible move by an opponent. They should win some kind of award for persistence or perhaps obsessiveness, spending 18 years to calculate the 39 trillion possible moves.

But I like the director of UC's Center for Robotics' take on the matter. Ernest L. Hall says he eagerly anticipates the real-world problems that can be attacked in such a methodical and analytic manner.

I'll suggest two. Feel free to add your own:

Let's set computers to working out the ultimate, perfect, never-to-be-tampered with layout for a grocery store. Plug in all the variables -- all the tricks and traffic patterns that could make people like me buy a million things we don't need -- and then create a single template for use by every single grocery store for time eternal. I don't care if it's not customer-friendly; I just want consistency. I can take life's major upheavals but mess with my traffic pattern in the grocery store, and I am one mad consumer. Can anybody relate?

And let's see if we can apply the Canadian researchers' move-countermove strategy to human interaction -- namely: a means by which parents can trump, trample or triumph over any argumentative point raised by their children. I do not believe myself alone in thinking that there is an underlying pattern to these conversations that, if I could just identify it, could be used to win the debate with my adolescent every time.

The strategy could go something like this: She raises the point about how little time she has for domestic chores (watching her brother, running errands for her parents, etc., etc.), and I counter with a brilliant calculation that would show how she can free up her time. She lobbies for her own car, and I win the point with a "green argument" that taps into all her burgeoning environmental sensibilities.

Maybe this isn't exactly what Mr. Hall had in mind, but I think we could be onto something. . . .