Computer Checkers

After reading Jonathan Schaeffer’s One Jump Ahead detailing his interesting march toward creating a world class caliber checkers player, I decided that it was a very interesting programming project. I had done some work on alpha-beta search way back in graduate school, but really hadn’t kept up with it, so I was basically relearning all the stuff that I knew back then, plus a bunch of new advancements and subtleties that I didn’t understand or appreciate.

So, my checkers program, Milhouse, was born.

I haven’t had the time to write this up, but I have made quite a bit of progress on this. It’s able to solve some pretty interesting problems. Try this one: white is to move and win. Milhouse sees the win in 0.3 seconds on my old desktop.

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7 thoughts on “Computer Checkers

  1. Patrick Parker

    So I am out of practice a little but it took me over an hour! at work to solve this problem.
    27-24,19-9,7×14,15-11,1×10,11-07,13×6,18×2,25×18,23×14,10×17,19-16,3×10,2-6,12×19,1×13
    I am using being at work as an excuse for it taking so long but it was a tough problem. Got more?

  2. Saif

    Honing logic while working, very useful for sharpening the brain, very interesting and should be tried sometime. Although now everything is instantaneous with the computer in solving logic problems but your method worth trying.

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