Simple Checkers Engine 1.12 help
The simple checkers engine is essentially my ANSI-C checkers program "simple checkers" (source code here) compiled into a dll for CheckerBoard. However, it has an enhanced evaluation function compared to simple checkers. You can find the source code of the dll in your CheckerBoard folder. The code is lightly documented, so you can also make changes if you like.

Simple checkers displays some information about its search in the status bar. From left to right it displays the best move, the time used, the search depth in ply (one ply is one move of one side, so if both sides make one move, thats two ply), the evaluation as seen from the point of view of black, so a negative evaluation means that simple checkers thinks white is better, and then some statistics on the search tree: the number of nodes, the number of generated movelists (gms), the number of generated capturelists (gcs), and the number of position evaluations (evals).

Simple checkers performs an iterative-deepening alpha-beta search. It uses quiescence extensions. That's already all to it, that's also why it's called simple checkers. No killer moves, no hashtable, no endgame tables, no move ordering, no windowing , no nothing.

Simple checkers searches about 400'000 nodes/second on my Athlon K7 600MHz, which enables it to look 11-13 ply ahead on a 5-second search. Simple checkers is quite good as long as tactics abound, but in endgames it is rather helpless.

The simple checkers engine is free, just like CheckerBoard.

Simple checkers has no engine options. Whatever you do in the CheckerBoard engine options dialog has no effect.

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions or whatever, write to me! Just one small point: if you have trouble with CheckerBoard or simple checkers, please always include the version numbers of the programs when asking for help.

But now: have fun!


created by Martin Fierz, Tuesday, June 27, 2000