Hello all.
I recently became interested in checkers again, wondering if it has
been solved yet. I saw the chinook page has solved one 3 move
opening, and might solve it soon.
So I decided to write my own checkers program. It shouldn't be that
tough, as I've written chess programs before long ago.
6 hours later, I have something that beats me every time!
Standard alpha-beta, with the only eval as 1 for pieces and 2 for
kings. No books. No hash table (yet). It gets to ply 16 (plus
quiescent search until no more captures) from the start in less than a
minute.
If anyone is interested, I'll send you a copy in exchange for feedback
and suggestions on how to make it better (both in play and the
interface). Right now it's a console app, not windowed.
Other interesting factoids I found out from my program - on the
Chinook site it lists 641,335,986,590 possible positions with all 24
men, no kings. An exhaustive search showed that only 9,697,698 can be
reached fromt he starting position, so this means the entire tree is
significantly smaller than stated.
Chris
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