Computer Checkers Match Announcement (11/20/2004)

A marathon computer checkers match between Cake Manchester and Kingsrow will be held next week. All 156 of the 3-move tournament ballots will each be played four times, a total of 624 games! The match will be run on two computers, one in Switzerland and the other in New Jersey. The CheckerBoard program will manage the match games and keep track of the results, so that once it is started there will be no human input. Results will be announced here, and pdn files of all the games will be available for download.

Martin and I will also make freely available the complete opening books used in the match. These books are much larger than what has previously been available for download. The Cake book consists of 473,000 positions culled from a database of more than 1.4 million searched positions. The Kingsrow book contains 804,000 positions. Each of these books took several years of computer time to generate.

The match will begin next week after Martin and I exchange opening book files via email. Games will be played at CheckerBoard's setting of 1 minute per move. 312 games will be played in Switzerland on an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ computer with 1.5GB of RAM. Another 312 games will be played simultaneously in New Jersey on an Intel P4 3.2GHz computer with 3GB of RAM. Each checkers engine will be allotted the same memory for hashtables and database caching. Both engines in Switzerland will use Martin's 8-piece endgame database. In New Jersey, Kingsrow will use its 9-piece database while Cake will use its 8-piece database.

(Post-match update: I had memory problems with the P4 and had to run the NJ match on an Athlon XP 2800+ with 2GB ram.)