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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!ut-sally!oakhill!davet
From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: net.chess
Subject: Why can't a machine be World's Checkers Champ?
Message-ID: <474@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 2-Aug-85 05:20:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: oakhill.474
Posted: Fri Aug  2 05:20:37 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Aug-85 21:27:59 EDT
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 22

Scientific American a few months ago had an article about checkers strategy.
Having done a chess program at first glance it seemed to me that checkers
should be so much simpler than chess that a machine should certainly be
ranked as among the world's best, if not world champion.

Think about it.  Only 32 squares instead of 64.  Only 4 types of pieces
instead of 12, primitive moving rules, etc.  Transposition tables should
especially make a killing in checkers with significantly greater ply search
depths allowed.

So - treading into the unkown I'm porting my chess program to checkers on my
Macintosh, which means stripping out over 80 percent of the code which is
far more complicated than that needed for checkers.

The S.A. mentioned that some chess players were into checkers and claimed that
some said it ranked with chess in subtlety. Which leads me to this posting -
does anyone have an opinion?

I'll let you know when my program is converted.  It will be fun to see what
ply depth I can get on a Macintosh.

  --  Dave Trissel        {seismo,ihnp4,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!oakhill!davet