Update at last

I realize I'm one lazy blogger. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to call this a blog with these infrequent updates:)

Anyway, in my last post I mentioned that I might release some code for my GUI system. Sorry, won't happen anytime soon. The reason?
The usual. School eating up my time.

I'm taking a course in AI. And it has turned out to be one of the best courses I've taken so far.
The first assignment was to implement a Checkers program, and to be approved we had to enter a tournament. I teamed up with Jesper Ek (again) and Jacob Persson and we set out with a reasonable goal: to win the competition.

And that we did.

Our program, Black Doctor, won six games in a row but unfortunately lost the last one. That was enough to win the tournament, however.

Some info about the program:
* Written in C++, multi-platform
* Bitboard representation of game board.
* Alpha-Beta (iterative + recursive) and MTD(f) searching
* Transposition table
* Quiescense
* Dynamic time management
* Simple opening book and endgame database (3-pieces)
* ~1M nodes/sec on a 1.7MHz Pentium M

No screenie this time. Console UI's just aren't that sexy...