World Draughts Forum

So how does the Draughts-programming community look upon the victory of Scan? Is this a sensational and revolutionary development? I understood Fabien's program did not even use end-game tables.

Well, I don't play Draugts myself, so my intuition on this is limited. I have designed a number of slicing techniques for Chess EGTs, though, and I wanted to investigate if these would be of any use in Draughts. Building selected slices of end-games with only few Kings without first generating all ...

After reading through the entire thread, I'd like to contribute the following comments:

Sockets are a concept from low-level I/O, and it is better to make standards independent of this level of detail. Note that WinBoard does support running of (Chess) engines on other machines then it is running ...

I'm not sure about the 1-day job though: if you include adapting (and debugging!) the single-db generator to your scheme as well, it might take many days of work.
Ah, yes, it is good of you to point this out. Indeed programming it would be a job of many days, if not weeks. I am just to set in my ...

OK, it seems I have a workable scheme for factorization for the case of 4 Kings (of one color):

The board can be divided into 5 diagonal zones of 10 squares, by combing pairs of diagonals (1+9, 3+7 an 5+5 in one direction, 2+8, 4+6 and 10 in the other). If every zone contains 1 King (worst case ...

'On-the-fly' building of EGT slices with many irreversible pieces is a possibility that is very attractive for Chess. The problem is always that the slices required for the game at hand can eventually convert to the far greater end-games with promoted pieces. The situation in Draughts seems a ...

EGT generation is one of my hobbies, especially designing efficient algorithms for it. Until now it never occurred to me that EGTs coulkd be very important in draughts , perhaps more so than in Chess, where they really are not much help to improve playing strength of engines.

I wondered what the ...

Note that there already exists a version of WinBoard (the so-called Alien Edition) that has checkers / draughts amongst the supported variants. Compared to the standard version (which only supports Chess variants), this means that it solves the general problem of entering multi-captures, and ...