Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 04:51:39 08/02/01
Go up one level in this thread
On August 01, 2001 at 17:08:28, Dann Corbit wrote:
>On August 01, 2001 at 16:39:24, Nicolas GUIBERT wrote:
>
>>(traduction en français plus bas)
>>
>>Latest news about the match Samb-Buggy
>>
>>As you already now, the 1st man-machine match of the international draughts will
>>be played in August (13-19th) in France.
>
>What about Tinsley/Chinook?
>Or are checkers and "international draughts" two different games?
Yes completely different games.
Checkers is a kids game compared to Draughts (polish rules),
note that about every nation has his own national rules.
The most important game is most definitely draughts according to
polish rules. This is getting played not only by Nicolas GUIBERT and Buggy
and his GM opponent, but also by several nations:
- France
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Russia
- Senegal
And a few smaller nations.
Because of so many different games in so many different countries,
nearly no one is a professional player in these games. Time controls
are much faster as in chess. A very popular level is 60 moves in 1 hour
and then either stop the game (nearly all games are over before move
60) or quickly finish it.
Draughts is one of the few games where the game gets played at high
level.
Checkers definitely there was only 1 player who we could consider
to be a pro-player. His name was Tinsley, and he's dead now.
Only at his sickbed if i understand well, he was beaten by Chinook.
All other matches he won.
In the end it appears that Tinsley played the game quite perfect,
of course a relatively simple game like checkers CAN be played perfect,
amazingly so far i didn't hear a program solved it already.
Draughts is way harder than that.
Not only are there in 50 legal squares (versus checkers 32), but
you start with 20 stones (checkers 12), which is a magnitude
of possibilities more.
Still the total number of possibilities is far smaller than chess.
Amazingly national league dutch players easily draw any draughtsprogram,
sometimes even win from it. Beating a national draughtsplayer is
way harder as beating a GM in chess is (with exceptions of GMs who
play certain styles or already have big computerexperience).
My explanation for that phenomena is basically 2 fold:
- chessprograms have been put more work in than in draughtsprograms
- the center is less important in draughts as it is in chess,
so in chess you simply throw all pieces to the center and that's it
Note that search depths in draughts are huge, despite that nullmove
cannot be used. The average number of possibilities i measured at 10
in draughts, but in fact it's way smaller because hashtables get the
branching factor down to way smaller numbers.
>[snip]
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