As part of my ongoing checkers work, I downloaded the Open Checkers Archive and wrote a simple bison/flex parser to read in the data. I am not illiterate when it comes to bison and flex, but it’s usually long enough between uses that it takes me an hour or two to tinker these things together. But, an hour or so later, and I’ve got a simple parser that can read all the games. It doesn’t do much of anything with the games at the moments, but having a parser allowed me to gather some really simple statistics about the archive. There are 22621 games in the archive, and totalling 1158096 moves. There are 276921 single jumps, 25405 double jumps, 2406 triple jumps, and just 7 quadruple jumps. There are 3626 wins for Black, 4803 wins for White, and 14192 draws.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll use this for quite yet, but I’m sure something will come to me.