Dama Italiana 1.00 help
Dama Italiana is my simple checkers engine adapted to play the italian version of checkers, compiled into a dll for CheckerBoard. 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.

The rules of Italian checkers are:

  • Men and kings move one square at a time, like in English checkers.
  • Men cannot jump kings.
  • If more than one jump is possible, the one which captures the largest number of stones must be played.
  • If still more than one jump is possible, and some of the jumps are with men and others with kings, one of the jumps with a king must be played.
  • If still more than one jump is possible, the jump which captures the largest number of kings must be played.
  • If still more than one jump is possible, the jump which captures a king first must be played.
  • White starts the game.
Dama Italiana 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 the number of nodes searched.

Dama Italiana performs an iterative-deepening alpha-beta search. It uses quiescence extensions. That's already all to it - no killer moves, no hashtable, no endgame tables, no move ordering, no windowing , no nothing.

Dama Italiana 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. It is quite good as long as tactics abound, but in endgames it is rather helpless.

Dama Italiana is free, just like CheckerBoard.

Dama 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 Dama Italiana, please always include the version numbers of the programs when asking for help.

But now: have fun!


created by Martin Fierz, Sunday, March 11, 2001