Sunday, May 22, 2005

More old code

I built a 6-piece suicide checkers endgame database (up to 4 vs 2 pieces, no 5 vs 1) a couple of months ago, and generated a suicide checkers opening book with Suicidal Cake. One of the problems in suicide checkers is that endgames which are materially lopsided are not clear at all. Imagine a situation where one side has one piece remaining, and the other side has N, with N being a large number, e.g. 4. Sometimes the position is such that the side with one piece manages to lose his last piece, sometimes not. If he can't do that more or less immediately, he will usually lose; like in normal checkers, it is good to have more material in suicide checkers. There are many exceptions though, and for these Suicidal Cake should have a larger database, especially also lopsided databases like the 5 vs 1 which I didn't generate. I didn't generate it because my old database generator was limited to 4 pieces per side. This weekend, I cleaned up my old db generator (it hurt!), and removed this 4-piece limitation. I plan to build at least the 7-piece suicide database including all lopsided databases with the new generator.

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