perft for checkers

A couple of days ago I got a mail from Aart Bik, a programmer working at Google. He is currently developing a checkers application (among others) for the Google android platform (aka gPhone). He asked me about perft numbers for checkers. Perft is an invention of the chess programming community, a test to verify the correctness of the move generator, by printing how many legal moves exist in a search tree to depth N from the current position. Although I have this function in my chess engine, I never thought of adding it to Cake until now. However, Aart is right, and a perft function is always good to have for debugging purposes, so I added it to Cake. In the next CheckerBoard/Cake release, Cake will have this functionality. For starters, here are the numbers Cake reports from the initial position:

depth 1 positions 7
depth 2 positions 49
depth 3 positions 302
depth 4 positions 1469
depth 5 positions 7361
depth 6 positions 36768
depth 7 positions 179740
depth 8 positions 845931
depth 9 positions 3963680
depth 10 positions 18391564
depth 11 positions 85242128
depth 12 positions 388623673

Aart is happy too, since his numbers match. If you are interested in his applications for the gPhone, then check out his blog.