GUI checkers 1.05

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's GUI checkers running at an amazing 4.5 million nodes per second on my Athlon 64 3000+! I managed to coax Jon Kreuzer from his checkers retirement by requiring a tiny change in the way engines interact with CheckerBoard, and instead of just implementing this change, he went on to improve GUI further. It is now searching about 3 times as fast as Cake Manchester. You can download GUI on Jon's checkers page.
Jon also wrote a nice tutorial on bitboards in checkers programs, which gives you an idea on how to program a blazingly fast checkers program.

PS: of course, speed is not everything. There are reasons why Cake is so much slower than GUI, and it's not only that Jon is a more accomplished programmer. Cake has larger endgame databases which take time to probe, and it also has a more complex evaluation function. As you know from our human checkers experience, it is not necessary to examine millions of positions to find a good move - it is more important to examine the right positions, and to evaluate them correctly. Cake Manchester is better than GUI checkers despite searching less positions per second.

GUI checkers 1.00

Jon Kreuzer has released version 1.00 of his program, Gui checkers. There is a standalone version as well as a dll which works as an engine in CheckerBoard. The main improvement over 0.99 is that 1.00 now has an opening book, which enhances the playing strenght. You can download Gui checkers on Jon's checkers page.

GUI checkers 0.99

Jon Kreuzer has released a new version - 0.99 - of his GUI checkers. You can download it on his checkers page. It is much better than simple checkers, but (still) weaker than KingsRow or Cake. It also comes with complete source code!

GUI checkers 0.90

One month ago, I wrote about a small checkers program called GUI checkers 0.80 by Jon Kreuzer. He just released version 0.90 which you can download on his homepage. Great news: the new version is also available as a dll for CheckerBoard. It is much stronger than simple checkers, but also still clearly weaker than Cake or KingsRow. The lack of book and endgame database is too big a handicap. GUI also comes with source code, where you can look at some more advanced techniques which are not demonstrated in simple checkers, such as hashtables and forward pruning.

Gui Checkers .80

I recently came across a quite unknown checkers program written by Jon Kreuzer, Gui Checkers .80. Jon has written a very good chess program, so I was naturally curious about his checkers program. It turns out he wrote it (including the interface) in only a few days, so it's not as good as the best programs out there. But the interface has nice graphics, and I bet that with a little effort, Jon could develop a top checkers engine. Perhaps you can encourage him to do so?