| Author |
Message |
Bob Newell (Chipschap)
| | Posted on Sunday, December 07, 2003 - 12:16 pm: | |
While preparing reviews for my collection of checker program reviews at http://www.chungkuo.org I decided to review the checkers game that comes with Zillions. I'll be honest, I expected another ho-hum checker player. I was very much in the wrong! The Zillions checker playing engine is easily best in class (that class being general purpose programs).
Zillions plays a very strong and credible game of checkers. Can anyone say who wrote this checkers engine? Recognition is surely deserved. |
Jeff Mallett (Jeffm)
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 11:08 am: | |
There is no separate checker playing engine involved here and so no checkers-specific knowledge -- it's just the normal Zillions engine reading in the rules for how to play checkers at run-time. The Zillions engine was written by me (Jeff Mallett) and Mark Lefler. |
Bob Newell (Chipschap)
| | Posted on Thursday, December 11, 2003 - 10:43 pm: | |
This is quite something. I am blown away. Here is what I added to my review (of the checker playing feature of Zillions):
"Footnote: amazed that this little program played such a respectable game, I contacted the authors about it. It turns out that they did not write a checkers engine. They just wrote a "rule set" and the internal, generalized game engine of Zillions ran against the rule set! My admiration and respect goes out to these designers. A general game engine that is both flexible and good is no small achievement."
By the way, in January I'm running my own "round robin" tournament of some 20 checker playing programs. I'll post here how Zillions makes out. |
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