CheckerBoard base package and add-ons by Martin Fierz
Cake 1.89f 64-bit with new opening book (2449 KB).
Unzip the file cake_189f.dll, book.bin and the help file (cake189.htm) into your engines folder in CheckerBoard, and egdb64.dll in the CheckerBoard folder to use it.
Ideally, you download CheckerBoard in its latest incarnation from Ed Gilbert's website, and then add Cake 1.89f. Please note: this .dll will only work with a 64-bit install of CheckerBoard!
- Cake Sans Souci, 1.81 and 1.85 64-bit (539 KB).
These are historical versions of Cake, at times when it was probably the world's best checkers engine (from 2003, Cake Sans Souci, to probably 2018, Cake 1.85). They are great engines, but much weaker than the incredible machine-learned engines we have today. I have put them here for historical reasons. Unzip the file cake_oldversions.zip into your engines folder in CheckerBoard.
Please note: these engines are all compiled for 64 bit and will only work with a 64-bit install of CheckerBoard! Also, these engines need the Cake databases, and will not work with Ed Gilbert's improved databases, whereas the current version of Cake can also use the KingsRow databases.
- Warning, old! CheckerBoard 1.72 (2047 KB) with
setup program.
Package with CheckerBoard 1.72, Cake 1.81, a 93'000 move opening book for Cake,
the 4-piece endgame database for Cake, Easy Checkers, Simple Checkers (+ source code), Dama (+ source code), Kingscourt Cake, Suicidal Cake
with 4-piece endgame database,
a game database with hundreds of games by Marion Tinsley, and a checkers tutorial for beginners by
grandmaster Richard Pask.
I recommend getting the most current version of CheckerBoard at Ed Gilbert's site instead. It also comes with Cake 1.89f.
- CheckerBoard 1.72 64-bit (2109 KB) with
setup program. The same as the above, but for 64-bit Windows.
- The opening book for Suicidal Cake (336KB).
An opening book for Suicidal Cake, generated with the 8-piece suicide checkers endgame database. It contains 35'649 positions.
The installation is the same as for the huge opening book for Cake.
- Cake endgame databases for use with Cake. Ed Gilbert's KingsRow endgame databases are more efficient than these, so use those if possible.
The only reason to keep them here is if you want to use the older engines that you can download here.
You must extract the zip-files into the 'db' subdirectory of your CheckerBoard directory. Cake will display which databases it is using when you click 'Engine - About'. Cake will play even stronger with these additional endgame databases installed.
Warning: when you install one of these databases, you must also install all smaller databases, i.e. if you install the 7-piece database you MUST install the 5- and 6-piece endgame database too, or Cake will crash. Note that you can also generate the 5- and 6-piece databases from within CheckerBoard. If you did this, you don't have to download them.
The Cake endgame database also works with KingsRow, and you should prefer it over the Chinook database - the Cake database is about 20% smaller, therefore it can be accessed more efficiently. Please note: Cake 1.88q and later can also use the KingsRow database, which is compressed even more, and if you only want to use the latest version of Cake, you should use the Kingsrow database rather than the Cake database.
- The 5- and 6-piece endgame database (21.9 MB)
- The 7-piece endgame database (170 MB)
- 8-piece database part I (1173 MB)
- 8-piece database part II (1181 MB)
- Suicide checkers endgame databases for use with Suicidal Cake. You must extract the zip-files into the 'scdb'
subdirectory of your CheckerBoard directory. Suicidal Cake will display which databases it is using
when you click 'Engine - About'. It will play even stronger with these additional
endgame databases installed.
Warning: when you install one of these databases, you must also install all smaller databases, i.e. if you install the 7-piece database you MUST install the 2-to-6-piece endgame database too, or Suicidal Cake will crash.- The 2-to-6-piece endgame database (96 MB)
- The 7-piece endgame database (0.99 GB)
- Cake Manchester 1.09d (148KB), the predecessor of Cake
1.85. I'm leaving it here for 'historical reasons'.
This is a .dll file which you can save in your CheckerBoard folder. Use your right mouse button to click on the link, choose
the menu option "save target as..." and navigate to your CheckerBoard folder, then choose
the subdirectory "engines" to save the
file there. To use it in CheckerBoard, you will have to change your primary engine to cakeM109.dll in the engines dialog. On Windows
Vista and Seven, you will have to run CheckerBoard with administrative rights to use this engine, because it writes its logfile in the
CheckerBoard folder which is forbidden on newer Windows versions.
- Cake Sans Souci 1.04 (140KB), the predecessor of Cake
Manchester. It is not as good as Cake Manchester, but I'm leaving it here for 'historical reasons'.
This is a .dll file which you can save in your CheckerBoard folder. Use your right mouse button to click on the link, choose
the menu option "save target as..." and navigate to your CheckerBoard folder, then choose
the subdirectory "engines" to save the
file there. To use it in CheckerBoard, you will have to change your primary engine to cakeM109.dll in the engines dialog. On Windows
Vista and Seven, you will have to run CheckerBoard with administrative rights to use this engine, because it writes its logfile in the
CheckerBoard folder which is forbidden on newer Windows versions.
- Kingscourt opening book (~2MB).
Kingscourt is a checkers variant where the first player to crown a king wins. Unlike regular checkers this means that there is always a
winner! I solved the game of Kingscourt on January 17 2006;
white wins in approximately 62 half-moves. This opening book contains a partial solution - it goes as
deep as necessary so that the Kingscourt engine will be able to find the final win within a couple of
seconds on a fast computer. To install, extract this opening book into your engines subdirectory of the CheckerBoard folder.
3rd party add-ons
- You can download KingsRow and an opening book for KingsRow on
Ed Gilbert's webpage. KingsRow is a very strong engine for CheckerBoard.
Source Code
I decided to publish the source code to CheckerBoard, and also the source code for my endgame database. All of these are Visual C projects, which you can open with the free express version of Microsoft Visual C. You may use this source code in any way you like. Please note: The quality of my code ranges from sensible at best to crappy at worst. I'm sorry about this, I guess I should have studied computer science instead of physics ;-) I wanted to clean up this code before publishing it, but then I realized that I would never release it if I waited until it was cleaned up - my motivation for cleaning up is way too low! So without further apologies, here goes:- CheckerBoard 1.72 source code
(156 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database generator source code
(30 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database compressor source code
(19 KB) as zipfile.
- Endgame database access source code
(13 KB) as zipfile.
-- December 21, 2009