Author: Roberto Waldteufel
Date: 16:00:06 04/07/99
Go up one level in this thread
On April 07, 1999 at 18:11:33, Adnan wrote: >On April 07, 1999 at 17:20:07, Roberto Waldteufel wrote: > > >>Hi Dave, >> >>The main things that separate Chinook from top PC programs are the hardware and >>the endgame databases. Chinook has tablebases for all endings with 8 or fewer >>pieces, whereas none of the commercials have more than 6-piece tablebases. >>Furthermore, Chinook has gigabytes of RAM so as to hold all these tablebases in >>memory rather than on disk. > >Are there any good shareware/freeware programs for checkers? > There are a large number of free checkers programs, but most of them are absolutely abysmal in terms of playing strength, although many of them do sport very impressive graphics for whatever that is worth (not much IMHO). I have found only one that I consider to be of a good standard in terms of strength: it is called Blitz (nothing to do with Cray machines!), and is a stripped down version of the commercial program Sage by Adrian Millett, which is one of only 4 strong commercial programs of which I am aware. There is a DOS and a Windows version, but I would recommend the DOS one from my own experience. You can download Blitz from the Chinook site, or from PC Solutions, the company that markets Sage. >The other day in a book store I saw a book by a Bridge player from Pakistan. >In one chapter he wrote that he offered six million dollars to any computer that >would beat him. Later in the same chapter he went on to say that no one who >plays Bridge seriously responded to his challenge because all >Bridge players know that it is not possibly for a computer to beat the >world champion (him). > >Is that right? Is it impossible to program a Bridge program that plays >at the level of Bridge world champion? Sorry - I don't know. However, I can't help wondering if the champion really has $6,000,000 spare if he were proved wrong. If the challenge is really to be taken seriously, it would seem like a very interesting thing to tackle. For that kind of money it would be possible to put together a very powerful team of programmers and top flight players, and even perhaps to develop special purpose hardware as IBM did in order to beat Kasparov. Best wishes, Roberto
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.