brainwagon

I was waiting for sleep to come, and surfed over to the American Checker Federation website. As long-time readers of this blog might remember, I’ve been tinkering a checkers program together, which I tentatively named “Milhouse” to play checkers. This week’s problem challenge was a classic 2 on 3 battle where White is to move […]

This morning, I woke up and was trying to resolve a problem: why is Milhouse (my checkers program) so slow? The answer didn’t seem entirely obvious, so I pondered it some more. I refined it to “why is Milhouse so slow when it accesses the endgame database files?” I think I know why, but unfortunately, […]

So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been working on fixing the WLD database lookup code in Milhouse, in an attempt to get it to handle endgame positions properly. There is a tiny bit of subtlety which I haven’t seen explained anywhere else, so I think I’ll take a moment here to explain it. […]

I was surfing over at Bob Newell’s “Checker Maven” website, and found this awesme collection of PDN files for download. I have a table of challenging positions compiled into milhouse, which I use for debugging and testing, so I decided to hack a simple parser to input some of the positions into Milhouse. The “Gem […]