The 8×8 variant of draughts was weakly solved in 2007 by a team of Canadian computer scientists led by Jonathan Schaeffer.

From the standard starting position, both players can guarantee a draw with perfect play.

The December 1977 issue of the English Draughts Association Journal published a letter from Alan Beckerson of London who had discovered a number of complete games of twenty moves in length.

These were the shortest games ever discovered and gained Alan a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

In February 2003, Martin Bryant (author of the Colossus draughts program) published a paper on his website[1] presenting an exhaustive analysis showing that there exist 247 games of twenty moves in length (and confirmed that this is the shortest possible game) leading (by transposition) to 32 distinct final positions.

Noted world champions include Andrew Anderson, James Wyllie, Robert Martins, Robert D. Yates, James Ferrie, Alfred Jordan, Newell W. Banks, Robert Stewart, Asa Long, Walter Hellman, Marion Tinsley, Derek Oldbury, Ron King, Michele Borghetti, Alex Moiseyev, Lubabalo Kondlo,[5] Sergio Scarpetta, Patricia Breen, and Amangul Durdyyeva.

In November 1983, the Science Museum Oklahoma (then called the Omniplex) unveiled a new exhibit: Lefty the Checker Playing Robot.

Programmed by Scott M Savage, Lefty used an Armdroid robotic arm by Colne Robotics and was powered by a 6502 processor with a combination of BASIC and Assembly code to interactively play a round of checkers with visitors.

Originally, the program was deliberately simple so that the average visitor could potentially win, but over time was improved.

[8] In the 1990s, the strongest program was Chinook, written in 1989 by a team from the University of Alberta led by Jonathan Schaeffer.

In 1994, Tinsley had to resign in the middle of an even match for health reasons; he died shortly thereafter.

In 1995, Chinook defended its man-machine title against Don Lafferty in a thirty-two game match.

[9] In 1996 Chinook won in the U.S. National Tournament by the widest margin ever, and was retired from play after that event.

In July 2007, in an article published in Science Magazine, Chinook's developers announced that the program had been improved to the point where it could not lose a game.

After eighteen years, they have computationally proven a weak solution to the game of checkers.

When draughts is generalized so that it can be played on an m×n board, the problem of determining if the first player has a win in a given position is EXPTIME-complete.