alcatraz.blog

Today was the big day… The “intelligent” checkers game ‘Abraham’, developed by our project team (2 Polish guys, 1 Chilean guy and me) started into a checkers tournament. Our team (including Abraham) was quiet nervous…

The first surprising thing, when we entered was, that the rules changed. Instead of leetin calculate it 1 minute, we only had 15 seconds to calculate. But that was just changing one line of code.

Our program was programmed in C++, and we used a text mode presentation to display the board. We hoped, when we killed all unnecessary processes (graphical user interface, network manager, daemons, …), we would be faster. As well, we started the program with a “nice” value of -20 (highest priority).

First game

The opponent was a program written in C# and used a fancy user interface. To be honest, it looked really good.
Both programs played quiet smart moves and chances looked equally. And it was! Because the game ended in a draw. Actually, it ended in a deadlock and the rules say -> deadlock = draw. We ended the game with 3 kings, 0 checkers and the opponent 2 kings, 0 checkers.

Second game

Our second opponent was using a text mode presentation as well. But I don’t know in which language it was programmed. But I believe it was programmed in C++ as well. The other program seemed to have some problems with the artificial intelligence part. Because it made some not very clever moves. Very fast, we were in a high leading position (Abraham: 2 kings and ~7 checkers  -  Opponent: 3 checkers). Then suddenly the unexpected happened! Our program crashed because of a Segmentation Fault! The rules say, that then we lost. So, unfortunately, we lost because of a program crash We did immediately analyzed the problem. (But we didn’t fix it).

Third game

Our third opponent was also using the text mode presentation of the game. It was a nice game, because we could do multiple jumps and our program acted with some nice moves. But here, we also just could get a draw because of a deadlock.

Conclusion

All in all, it was fun to program such a program and observe the evolution of it. When it gets better and better. The atmosphere in the team was very good and we had (even in “bad times” (have a big bug and not able to find it) fun).

If our program would not have crashed with the game we very probably would have won, we would be the winners of the tournment. But as a famous guy named Mick Jagger already told: You can’t always get what you want…

But for me, project ‘Abraham’ was a success!

Some extra information: The game checkers is solved! It is a draw! (When the two players play perfectly).