Open Office 2.0

Totally off-topic - or maybe not: Open Office 2.0 has been released. It's not quite as off-topic as it may seem: CheckerBoard is freeware, and so is Open Office. I'm always on the lookout for decent free software, and Open Office certainly belongs into this category (much more so than CheckerBoard). If you're tired of paying Micro$oft for annoying you with talking paper clips, try this!



While I'm at it: If you're looking for a decent program to create installations, try Inno Setup.

On my computers at home, I also use free antivirus software: Anti-Vir personal edition on my desktop computer and AVG free edition on the laptop. I haven't made up my mind as to which one is better.

When it comes to graphics, I use XnView.

I edit my website with Arachnophilia. But I'm not 100% satisfied with it - it's very no-frills, and you need to know your HTML to use it.

How about you? What free software works well for you? I'm only interested in productive software like the above, not in games like CheckerBoard :-)
If you know of a great free program (no NagWare or trial versions!), please add a comment!

CheckerBoard @ Wikipedia!

I just noticed that CheckerBoard has its very own Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is one of the best things I've ever seen on the net, and I'm flattered to see my humble program being mentioned there :-)

ISCA world championship games

I went over the games played between George Miller and Yuri Sorkin with Suicidal Cake. George has started publishing those games on the ISCA message board. The comments by Suicidal Cake are not on yet, but will be soon. Analyzing human games is one of the few things that I can do with Suicidal Cake - the players don't want to see it published :-(

What's the fastest loss in suicide checkers?

The title says it all: I want to go looking for the fastest loss in suicide checkers with the help of my Suicidal-Cake-generated opening book. Any guesses?

ICSA world championship

Over the last days, George Miller and Yuri Sorkin fought for the suicide checkers world championship over the internet. George won a very close match with 6.5-5.5. I had Suicidal Cake look at the games, and have a small challenge for you: in the following game, Yuri missed a win very early in the opening. What should he have played here?

[Event "3rd ISCA World Championship Match"]
[Date "2005-09-30"]
[Black "George Miller"]
[White "Yuri Sorkin"]
[Result "1-0"]

1. 12-16 21-17 2. 9-13 24-20 3. 8-12 25-21 4. 16-19 {already a loser! 5-9 instead is probably a draw} 23x16 5. 12x19

White to move and win!

Why a chess player programmed checkers

I'm a chess player. I learned the rules when I was five years old, joined a club when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and have been playing ever since. So why did I write a checkers program? I once tried to write a chess program when I was 17 or 18 - I failed miserably. After learning how to program a bit more seriously, I still didn't feel ready to write a chess program, and tried my hand at Connect Four instead. That's a game with very simple rules, and I learned all the basics of strategy game programming like alpha-beta pruning and hashtables there. Later on, when I felt a bit more familiar with the concepts of strategy game programming, I again wanted to write a chess program, but still didn't feel confident enough. So I wrote a checkers program although I had never played the game myself at all. The only reason that I chose checkers was that it was somewhere between Connect Four and chess in the complexity of its rules, and the fact that I read about the Tinsley-Chinook matches in time magazine. It may seem strange that a weak player can write a strong program, but in chess the same pattern has often been seen: the programmers of many strong programs like Shredder, Chess Genius, Chess Tiger etc are all quite weak players themselves.

2 million moves!

My book generator just passed the 2 million move mark. For me this was a psychologically important moment, although as a physicist I am usually immune against that kind of innumeracy. The reason this one number means something to me is an email I received from Murray Cash (programmer of Nemesis) over 3 years ago. He had just completed a match between Nemesis and Cake++ 1.4 (the details are still available on the Nemesis benchmarks page). His conclusion then was that Cake was a decent engine, but that it would need a book of 2 million moves or so. It took me and my computer farm quite some time to come up with this book! I'm glad I had the patience to build this book...

KestoG 1.1

I just put up a new version of Kestutis Gasaitis' Russian checkers engine, KestoG 1.1. The main difference to the previous version is that the hashtable is now resizeable - besides this, there are some minor modifications to the search. You can download it from the checkers download page.

KingsRow 1.15a

Ed Gilbert has published a new version of KingsRow, 1.15a. You can download it on his website. The new version of KingsRow plays a better game, and removes the engine unlock feature that future versions of CheckerBoard will no longer support. That means that older versions of Kingsrow (1.14xy and earlier) will no longer work with the next update of CheckerBoard.

A russian checkers engine for CheckerBoard

I received a new CheckerBoard engine this morning from Lithuania. Kestutis Gasaitis has written an engine which plays Russian checkers - the kings fly and men can capture backwards in this version. I already lost three times against it! You can download the engine on the CheckerBoard website. It even comes with source code!