Wednesday, November 01, 2006

KingsRow 1.16

Checkers programming is going slow for me these days, and I don't seem to be the only one: It took Ed Gilbert over half a year to release a new version of KingsRow (1.16) which is now available for download on his webpage. We both seem to have used our time for other projects (For me, writing a suicide checkers engine, for Ed, more sensibly, writing a 10x10 international checkers engine).

I am running a match with KingsRow 1.16 against Cake Manchester 1.09d right now, and it's looking good for KingsRow: after 200 of 288 games, KingsRow is in the lead with 12-11 wins. If KingsRow wins the match, it would be the first time ever since 2004 that I see Cake losing a match - which brings me back to the introduction of this post: One of the reasons that I didn't do very much since my initial Cake Manchester release in 2004 is that it consistently beat KingsRow since then, and that I wasn't motivated to work on Cake because it was (IMO of course) still the world's most powerful checkers engine. It looks like I might have to shake the dust off Cake's source code soon!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"We both seem to have used our time for other projects (For me, writing a suicide checkers engine, for Ed, more sensibly, writing a 10x10 international checkers engine)."

Are there plans to continue with this trend and start writing engines for different variations of draughts? So far I know there's an italian, spanish and russian engine for checkerboard...so are brazilian (same rules as 10x10 just on 8x8 board), 10x10 international (which is being worked on) some future projects as well?

Martin Fierz said...

I don't have any current plans to write further engines - I hardly have time to look after the code that I already have... However, I hope that other people will continue to contribute - Angel Galan Galan for instance has just released a new engine which plays Brazilian checkers!

Unknown said...

hi Martin plz where can i find a spanish draught engine