How to pronounce “checkers” in English

pitting two of these refrigerator-sized things against each other and sleeping in the IBM factory, watching these machines play checkers.And checkers is the first chapter in my book and has a really fascinating story.I think checkers gets a real bad rap as sort of a child's game, a sort of pre-chess sort of--

Can you tell us a bit about the term "cooks" that you have and why those moves were important for the gameof checkers? Yeah, "cooks" is one of these fantastic pieces of game jargon that I really love.So a cook comes-- most likely comes from the phrase, "your goose is cooked," as in, your checkers opponent's goose is cooked.

So a cook comes-- most likely comes from the phrase, "your goose is cooked," as in, your checkers opponent's goose is cooked.And checkers, like, I think, every game in my book, and many games, has its own literature, sort of accumulated human wisdom of how the game oughtto be played, what are good opening moves, and what are bad opening moves, and so on.

And kind of going into some of the earlier AIs around games, you talk, in your book, about checkers and some of the early projects around buildingAI that can play checkers and win at checkers.Can you tell us a little bit about that?

And checkers is the first chapter in my book and has a really fascinating story.I think checkers gets a real bad rap as sort of a child's game, a sort of pre-chess sort of--this thing that's limited to, what, indoor recess when you're in elementary school or whatever.

this thing that's limited to, what, indoor recess when you're in elementary school or whatever.Yeah But checkers was this first real test of machines.And the computer programmer started figuring out, how do I quickly and efficiently traverse the tree that

And the computer programmer started figuring out, how do I quickly and efficiently traverse the tree thatis a game of checkers?How do I accurately evaluate positions on this tree once I get to them?

So a cook is something that you can unleash to your opponent's surprise.Because the thing about checkers is so many games are drawn, even more so at the highest levels than chess, where there's a lot of draws.And one win is hugely important in checkers, so you spend all your time hunting down cooks.

I'm not sure. He had two great loves in his life.One was checkers, and one was God.He was a very devout Christian and evangelical minister.

And these seem to be the things that occupied him entirely.And his devotion to checkers was-- seemed to be just as strong as his devotion to his Christian religion.And he devoted time as equally faithfully to both, and seemed to live and breathe both at the same time.

or later that day, on the board.How do the checkers tend to flow this way and that way around the board?

games with a person of a different color by law.You couldn't play checkers with a black guy if you were a white guy.So Jim Crow laws were a huge part of the history of the South.

but the historical references you might be making from your memory.But the fact checkers would always run these things down.And then when the draft was ready, sometimes during the fact-checking process, it would be circulated to the chief of staff

is in terms of selective exposure, do people read them?So the fact-checkers will tell you-- and I should say, I know the fact-checkers.And they're great. And they work very hard.

And that's probably true.And so the fact-checkers weren't on top of it as a target for fact-checking.

That was a good laugh, I want that on record.So the fact checkers came to me and said the bird's too big.

They tend to replay events over and over in your minds.And so they're email checkers.

Because the thing about checkers is so many games are drawn, even more so at the highest levels than chess, where there's a lot of draws.And one win is hugely important in checkers, so you spend all your time hunting down cooks.And indeed, that's what Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist still at the University of Alberta, set his computer program to work doing, hunting down

So this is not mathematically proven, but many suspect that perfectly played chess is a guaranteed draw, much like perfectlyplayed tic-tac-toe or checkers is a guaranteed draw.So two very, very good, equally matched players lead to a lot of draws.

or later that day, on the board.And it introduces something that checkers and chess doesn't have, which is this aspect of randomness, or this chance factor.

Because if the president has any questions, we can only have answers if we have-- whenever there's a verifiable assertion in a speech,it was the responsibility of the fact checkers to drop a footnote explaining where that came from.And so when the president would get a speech, he could be confident that, OK.

waiting for the world to end.That's him at the Checkers speech, with his completely inscrutable wife.He was losing. He was going to get kicked off of the Vice Presidential ticket, and he just rented a half hour of prime time

doing great reporting. But journalism -- really good journalism -- is a team effort, just as Google is a team effort. And you need editors, and you need -- in NewYorker's case -- copy editors and fact checkers. But when you do an investigative report or I go out and do a piece for the New Yorker, I have lots of people that are constantlyinvolved in my life. And when I hand that piece in to them, they'll say, "Hey, Ken you buried the lead, it's really in Paragraph 20, not where you put it." Or,

We have about 4,000 species of native bees, and over a third of them can only reproduce in the pollen of particular plants.You won't have the Baltimore checkerspot unless you have white turtlehead.I could talk all afternoon, all night, all week, all year about nature's specialized relationships.

All right, I know it looks like it's just me out here, but producing stories like this takes a whole team. Reporters,editors, fact-checkers, animators, camera people you don't even see right now, so much more, all working together to make journalism that's accurate,nuanced, and hopefully fun to watch. And if high-quality independent journalism is important to you, then you would love

How do I accurately evaluate positions on this tree once I get to them?And so yeah, checkers was the site of a lot of really seminal computer science and the site of an absolutely fantastic sort of--I was about to say human versus machine, but really, human versus human-- battle that I talk about in that first chapter.

Yeah, that's exactly right.And mathematically speaking, checkers is simpler than chess, of course.But its top players make up for that difference by looking deeper into the game.

Right. So Schaeffer, Jonathan Schaeffer's, program was called Chinook, which is named after a wind that blows through Canada.The reason why it was called that is checkers is, in some parts of the world, called drafts-- so wind, draft.And this was his life's project, quite literally his professional life's project.

For almost two decades, this was what he did.And as his program Chinook got better and better at checkers, Schaeffer wanted to test it against the besthuman in the world.

to game, which is, at first, the machine is treated with utter disdain.No machine, says the checkers player, could ever do what I do, right?That fairly quickly dissolves once they start losing to the machine.

And then they published it, you know.And so I didn't have 3,000 highly intelligent fact-checkers.So the end result on that, the only difference there was I just had to be much, much, much more careful in my research.

So there's this nice, new report out by the Duke Reporters Lab that tracks the trend in the growth of fact-checking over the past 10 or so years.And we've seen about a 150% explosion in fact-checkers across the globe in the last three years in response to this upsurge in misinformation in democraciesacross the world.

They have the more persuasive claim, even when that's not the case.So this raises a real challenge for fact-checkers or for information providers of any sort, including everyone here.So the first question you might think about in terms of fact-checking is a potential response to fake news and misinformation more generally,

And that's probably true.that have been rated as false by established fact-checkers.

But obviously, we don't want to try to address every language that is used out there-- every different language.So we actually hooked up a bunch of model checkers to our own internal representation that'susing the Lustre long language.

of Journalism in fact when we hired a fact Checker one of our first fact Checkers who gave notice of a majornewspaper and that newspaper his boss said oh fact Checkers we used to havethose we've come into a time when the media is more and more pressed for time as you know when journalists have to

Listen, this is something that he'll encounter.I have some links in here for some different contrast checkers.

Because I was using 10% of the compute power in the AI lab, for my checker program.I was writing a program that would play checkers, and beat people, and play against computers, and that sort of thing.So I got christened, very early on, by some of the leaders in artificial intelligence at Stanford.

We would end up showin' up at White Castles or Checkers or Chik-fil-A or McDonalds.

you have black and white or red and black checkers or whatever on the chess board and every time you take a turn in

Only if we insist on being the only thinkers and the only checkers.

And indeed, that's what Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist still at the University of Alberta, set his computer program to work doing, hunting downthese cooks, these little pieces of checkers knowledge that had escaped the accumulated human wisdom.Right. So at the highest level, these checkers players would have gone through this literature a number of times and would know, almost intuitively, the set of moves

And he will do what every human does, which is die.And Schaeffer is essentially racing against the clock to beat this aging checkers master.Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's-- what you mentioned there about Tinsley's record is quite impressive.

or later that day, on the board.So the random element is the sort of first big difference from checkers, chess, and go.

Facebook is trying very hard with their tens of thousands of fact checkers.

Six, seven writers at the most, for president and vice president.A couple of researchers, a couple of fact checkers.So the speechwriting-- an event gets put on the president's schedule.

information but we're not just journalists although you could certainly say that a lot of what we do is a formof Journalism in fact when we hired a fact Checker one of our first fact Checkers who gave notice of a majornewspaper and that newspaper his boss said oh fact Checkers we used to have

So anything that has perfect information-- something like noughts and crosses or checkers or chess-- in theory has a strategy, a fixed set of rules, that if you follow them,

And at lunch we were talking about how the tooth clickers and the sub vocal checkers, and all that sort of thing.