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The Book

Over 5 years after my first attempts at creating checkers opening books, Cake's opening book is finally in a state where I am nearly satisfied with it. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest opening book for English checkers. The book is based on over 2.8 million analysed positions and contains 1'869'199 opening moves. For the sake of accuracy, I left out about 1 million positions at the end of the book tree which have no further analysis from successor positions. The book was computed on 3 different powerful dedicated machines over the last 4 years - if you want to contribute a little something to the cost of these PC's and the electricity bill, you can use the PayPal button below - thank you!

Download the book (Zip-File, 13'375KB).

Installation instructions: To install the book, unzip it into the engines subdirectory of your CheckerBoard directory (C:\program files\CheckerBoard by default). Cake will recognize the book automatically.

The opening book is error-free as far as I know, with one caveat: It is only error-free in lines into which Cake voluntarily plays when set to play "best moves". Only these lines are expanded fully. You may enter a line manually and find book play on it, but if Cake wouldn't play into that position on its own, the book line may not be expanded very far, and therefore may be flawed. If you happen to find any errors in the book, please help me to improve it! You can do this by sending an email to nospam1 at fierz dot ch with the subject line "checkers book" as subject and a FEN of the position where you think the book is playing a bad move in the message body (Press Alt+C in CheckerBoard, go to your mail message and press Ctrl+V in the message body). Do not write anything more, or less in the message - your mail is processed automatically, and if you write anything else, my mail-processing program will be confused and may not process your mail correctly.

-- October 12, 2007