Overall: Might be good for the four to six year old crowd. Checkers is a two-player game, where one player is assigned white checkers and the other red. It rates a 'C' in playing strength by virtue of a draw with Simple Checkers, and thus escapes the 'Don't Waste Your Time" award, although the packaging and marketing certainly could have put it there. (Had this been freeware my comments would of course differ.). This means that some world-class programs such as WCC Platinum, Colossus, Nemesis, and Wyllie are unfortunately not yet evaluated. Fortunately, the game is now abandonware and thus takes some effort to find, sparing you this experience. Purveyors of checker programs, please read this before sending me email about your latest creation! But we had a hunch, and so we played GUI against Nexus, the strong forerunner of the world-class Nemesis program. below in the Class C listings) in a convincing enough manner, but clearly can't stand against the Class A entries. Moving consists of clicking on a piece, to highlight it, and clicking on the destination square (you don't drag and drop, and in the case of multiple captures, you click on the very last square, which can be a bit disconcerting at first). Version 2.5 sells for $1.00. Even if you think it might entertain children, it will teach them a goofed-up version of checkers, so don't ruin their development by letting them near this game. Perhaps that is true, but the program plays a reasonable Class C game notwithstanding. Yes, I know, I'm dreaming. Stay away from this one. The match I set up with Simple Checkers was a very exciting tactical battle, with complex positions. So, should you spend the $5 the author asks for this program? ; 3.雷 Sophos — Good real-time scanning with remote access for 3 PCs. The program has a very nice and unobtrusive way of highlighting the set of legal moves once you've picked up a piece. The port is extremely plain, with no graphical appeal and no features at all, not even saved games or move review. It is free, and it is supplied with source code so you can see how it works. You have a choice of algebraic or numeric notation, but if you choose numeric, you can't get rid of the obtrusive square numbers. It didn't come off in the end as a true expert player, but the attempt was well-made and shows it. While not as strong as Kingsrow or Cake, it is probably the strongest open source checkers program, which makes it attractive for people that want to experiment with things like machine learning. What is interesting is the possibility of writing your own checkers game module with your own playing algorithm, since the whole idea of Zillions of Games is to provide an open interface to allow creation of more and more game modules. A screenshot, if you really want to see it, is here. The author has separately computed an opening database with about 1,500,000 positions, and his own highly-efficient 8 piece endgame database. The analysis version is not cheap; it's about $50 US. Their files are so large, and copied so often, that they have to consider file copying to be a lossly operation! Second, and quite important, is that there is no analysis mode as such. (There are several options including the inevitable red and black.) I use it mostly because it will run under Linux (Cake++ and Kcheckers are the only others). If you don't want to go all the way and buy Nemesis, certainly this is an inexpensive and most viable option. I'm not going to order the full version ($10 plus shipping) to see if there is any improvement at higher levels, as I really don't expect much. In an ending of one king vs. one king, where the program had the move on the lone king, far from the double corner, it couldn't figure out what to do in a case that required the barest of look-ahead. And it gets worse, very much worse, in fact. Undo moves to start of … Top checker programmers today find that the opening and ending databases are critically important. During the game, they keep up an on-and-off chatter, complete with postures, gestures, facial expressions, and so on. The author claims only 'average' play for the English checkers mode; I think it's a lot less than average, though. Even "dubs" and "scrubs" defeat these much of the time. A screen shot is here, and it is a true 'must-see.'. In the game based on equal level/ply, Maverick Checkers won some games and drew the rest. Perhaps Actual Checkers would have an endgame advantage, but I haven't really seen that yet; by the time the endgame is reached, Actual Checkers has been completely outplayed and is a piece or so down. Chinook is the strongest 8 × 8 checkers program around today. The interface is a little annoying; you click on a piece, drag the mouse to the destination square and click again. It runs both Simple Checkers and Cake++ and represents a substantial improvement over the XCheckers interface, though if you are not running the Gnome desktop it won't be an option for you. Very strong checkers / draughts player. While the game was certainly a good one, PC did have the better of it, eventually winning a piece but then not untypically finding itself unable to win a 3 kings vs. 2 kings endgame; a draw via move repetition was the final result. But the program hasn't seem to have had an update in some time, and I am not sure of its current status in that regard. The result was that Simple Checkers clearly had a win but was not able to finish it off. I gave PC two seconds per move and I set Palm to level 9. But then it blew the advantage away with a series of dumb moves and lost. This is pretty typical behavior; the program seems to no longer know what to do and starts making marginal or bad moves. By the way, did you know that White moves first? The author calls his program 'very strong' and that is somewhat understated. Most of the other programs, though, lose to Simple Checkers long before this stage. Feature Set: C (given that most options couldn't be figured out), Opening Book: Small (that's what they claim). Names the opening being played. There is an alternative board display as well, which looks like something out of a hallucinatory experience. If you play White, you play from the top down, because this program will not reverse the board! However, using this brute force approach, it seems like it will be several decades before we can improve substantially over Chinook. Daniel Lemire is a computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ) in Montreal. This is a very undistinguished program, even as a toy, and I am happy to bestow the "Don't Bother" award upon it. Now, this is not all bad, and in fact has a startling advantage. And buy Nemesis, certainly this is pretty typical behavior ; the has... 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