Intelligence is for the weak. Symmetry is for the pretty. Pure force is the way.
--- Unknown
Have you ever looked at a game and wondered how many possible states the game could reach? Or the probability of it reaching that particular state?
I have!
Computer systems with the power to rapidly solve these problems are now within the reach of the common man. For example, a top of the line Cray Y-MP C90 ran at 240 MHz and produced 67.16 scaler MFLOPS. This Cray would have cost, new, around $10 million USD. In contrast, a brand new AMD FirePro V7900 GPU card - a mere accessory to a desktop computer! - costs only around $200 USD and produces 464 GFLOPS - 50,000 times cheaper for almost 7,000 times more processing.
But wait! There's more!
Computing power is now a commodity item. An Amazon AWS c5n.18xlarge instance, available for $3.888 USD per hour, can reach 486 GFLOPS performance - and possibly higher. A p4d.24xlarge instance can reach 2.5 PetaFLOPS (2,500,000 GFLOPS) is less than $33 USD per hour. The available power is mind-shattering.
There is now sufficient power to process EVERY possible move for a vast number of games. We can burn through every play without even making the computer's CPU warm using nothing more than lunch money. It is a fantastic time to develop software.
See the code behind this website and even more code at: https://github.com/ldgcomputing.