Ananova:

Scientists say the ancient board game of draughts has finally been 'solved' by a computer program.

A Canadian team created the program which they say can win or draw any game, against any player.

It took an average of 50 computers nearly 20 years to sift through the 500 billion billion possible draughts positions.

Jonathan Schaeffer, lead author, told the BBC: "This was a huge computational problem to solve - more than a million times bigger than anything that had ever been solved before."

Professor Schaeffer consulted champion players to find out more about their game tactics and then fed this information into a computer program called Chinook.

Chinook was extremely successful - it won the World Checkers Championship in 1994 - but it was not perfect and occasionally lost.

So the computer scientists tried another approach in which hundreds of computers gathered so much information that the program 'knew' the best move in every situation.

Professor Schaeffer said: "I think we've raised the bar - and raised it quite a bit - in terms of what can be achieved in computer technology and artificial intelligence."

Researchers are now hoping to move on to even bigger problems. However, it seems that grand master of the board games - chess - may remain unsolved for some time.

It has somewhere in the range of a billion billion billion billion billion possible positions, meaning that computers, with their current capacity, would takes aeons to solve it.