Chinook Checkers Download
Sasha Stolt
The program on this site is the champion but it has been reduced in strength to allow you to "have a chance" at drawing. This program does not include the solution to checkers (see the "Proof" link on the home page). If you are good enough, you might even win! Good luck!
Checkers, variant of Draughts (drafts), is by far one of the most played board games in the world after Chess. Its a fun and challenging two-players game for all ages with friends. You can play it as a beginner or expert, for free or for money, on a checkers-board or online against a computer and even on your android phone, iOS or iPad.
There are many variants rules to play checkers online, with different gameboards and different number of pieces. The international checkers version Polish draughts , is regulated by the FMJD, Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames. In this variant, the each player has 20 stone on a 10 10 board.
Chinook is the first computer software to have taken the world championship title in a strategy game competition versus human players. In 1990, it gained the right to compete in the (human) world championship by finishing second after Marion Tinsley in the U.S. national championship. The English checker federations were at first opposed to the involvement of a computer in human competitions, but when Tinsley gave up his title in protest, the ACF and EDA created a new title, checkers against computer World Championship, and the match was played. Tinsley won it by four wins to two, with 33 draws.
On July 20, 2007, in an article published in the journal Science, 2 the mathematical resolution for the checkers game was found, with the result that of tables. That is, if both opponents always play the perfect game based on the complete and perfect analysis, the tables are guaranteed.
The Russian draughts are the same as the pool checkers with the difference that if in the middle of a capture you reach the last row you crown and you continue the capture as a lady and that the white ones start. It is played in parts of the former Soviet Union and in Israel they have different game modes.
A variant of the Russian draughts in which, using the same rules, the objective is reversed: the one who manages to run out of pieces or have the ones blocked has won. Generally, these lose/win versions are practiced in almost all checkers games, but not They are considered more than just entertainment. However, in Russia, this variant not only has its own name but also enjoys prestige and championships are held in the same way as with the Shashki variant.
Chinook is a computer program that plays checkers (also known as draughts). It was developed between the years 1989 to 2007 at the University of Alberta, by a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer and consisting of Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Martin Bryant, and Norman Treloar. The program's algorithms include an opening book which is a library of opening moves from games played by checkers grandmasters; a deep search algorithm; a good move evaluation function; and an end-game database for all positions with eight pieces or fewer. All of Chinook's knowledge was programmed by its creators, rather than learned using an artificial intelligence system.
In a rematch, Chinook was declared the Man-Machine World Champion in checkers in 1994 in a match against Marion Tinsley after six drawn games, and Tinsley's withdrawal due to pancreatic cancer. While Chinook became the world champion, it never defeated the best checkers player of all time, Tinsley, who was significantly superior to even his closest peer.[1]
Chinook's program algorithm includes an opening book, a library of opening moves from games played by grandmasters; a deep search algorithm; a good move evaluation function; and an end-game database for all positions with eight pieces or fewer. The linear handcrafted evaluation function considers several features of the game board, including piece count, kings count, trapped kings, turn, runaway checkers (unimpeded path to be kinged), and other minor factors. All of Chinook's knowledge was programmed by its creators, rather than learned with artificial intelligence.
I m a checkers lover used to play friends face to face then recently started playing on line and found too many player using programme that encouraged me to have a good one hope your programme wil be helpful to improve my game thanks
After 18-and-a-half years and sifting through 500 billion billion (a five followed by 20 zeroes) checkers positions, Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues have built a checkers-playing computer program that cannot be beaten. Completed in late April this year, the program, Chinook, may be played to a draw but will never be defeated.
A self-described "awful" checkers player, Schaeffer created Chinook to exploit the superior processing and memory capabilities of computers and determine the best way to incorporate artificial intelligence principals in order to play checkers.
With the help of some top-level checkers players, Schaeffer programmed heuristics ("rules of thumb") into a computer software program that captured knowledge of successful and unsuccessful checkers moves. Then he and his team let the program run, while they painstakingly monitored, fixed, tweaked, and updated it as it went.
Schaeffer started the Chinook project in 1989, with the initial goal of winning the human world checkers championship. In 1990 it earned the right to play for the championship. The program went on to lose in the championship match in 1992, but won it in 1994, becoming the first computer program to win a human world championship in any game--a feat recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Chinook remained undefeated until the program was "retired" in 1997. With his sights set on developing Chinook into the perfect checkers program, Schaeffer restarted the project in 2001."I'm thrilled with this achievement," he said. "Solving checkers has been something of an obsession of mine for nearly two decades, and it's really satisfying to see it through to its conclusion."
Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw.
Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts.
As Chinook has worked out all relevant lines of play, it needs virtually no time to 'think' to work out each perfect move in a game. The results were announced today in the journal Science1. The paper and supporting materials, including the ability to play Chinook, are available on the web at chinook/.
Schaeffer notes that his research has implications beyond the checkers board. The same algorithms his team writes to solve games could be helpful in searching other databases, such as vast lists of biological information because, as he says, "At the core, they both reduce to the same fundamental problem: large, compressed data sets that have to be accessed quickly."
Competitive checkers players seem appreciative of Schaeffer's work, rather than being depressed by the news. "People will keep right on playing checkers," says Bob Newell, editor of the world's most-read checker publication The Checker Maven. Ed Trice, designer of a chess variant named Gothic Chess and checkers expert (having won against some world champions), says that tournament players are likely to feel "literally no negative impact to the announcement". After all, as he notes, "people continued to run for sport after the invention of the automobile".
Scientists at the University of Alberta report that they've built an unbeatable checkers-playing computer. Their machine, Chinook, has solved checkers: It proves that if two players play perfectly, making no mistakes, the game of checkers will result in a draw.
The proof required analyzing 500 billion billion checkers positions -- 5 x 1020 -- a computational process that began in 1989 and has been running on hundreds of processors almost continuously since. Chinook now knows everything about checkers, the perfect response to any move, and the best that any human can do is drive Chinook to a draw. You can never win.
Checkers grandmasters have long suspected that perfect play would result in a draw, but until now, there has been no definitive proof. The first checkers-playing computer was created in 1963 by the artificial intelligence pioneer Arthur Samuel; the computer managed to win a single game against a human.
In 1989, Jonathan Schaeffer, who now heads the computer science department at Alberta, created Chinook with the aim of marshaling parallel processing and lots of storage to take on the world's best players. In 1990, Chinook became good enough to enter the checkers World Championships, and in 1992, it faced off against the world champion -- and the best checkers player who ever lived -- Marion Tinsley. Tinsley narrowly defeated Chinook. Then, in 1994, the pair had a rematch, but Tinsley took ill and withdrew in the middle of the game. He died of pancreatic cancer a short while later.
"The unfinished Tinsley match left the question unanswered as to who was the better player," Schaeffer and his colleagues write in this week's issue of the journal Science, where their paper is published. But now the answer is clear: "As great as Tinsley was, he occasionally made losing oversights -- he was human after all," they say. Chinook will not make mistakes, and thus becomes the greatest checkers player of all time.
The research makes checkers "the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times more complex that Connect Four," which was solved in 1989 (if two players play Connect Four perfectly, the first player will always either win or draw).
3a7c801d34