Dragon Draughts

Dragon plays international (10x10) draughts. Klik hier voor de nederlandse site
For the time being, Dragon is currently not being develloped any further and no support can be given

Main features of dragon draughts:
  • 3D-rotatable board
  • 15+ different playing levels, from beginner to master level
  • Tutor mode, warning you when you make a mistake
  • Multiple board layout's
  • Simultaneous analyses of all moves in a position
  • Automated analyses of games (with batch mode)
  • Nederlands/English/Francaise/Lithuanian language interface
  • Opening book (20000 positions)
  • Selective search
  • Tactical patterns
  • Probability based history heuristic
  • Optimal play endgame databases
  • Native PDN support
  • Plays both international and killer draughts (This is a draughts variants with less draws)

    • See Tournament results for a comparison with other programs.

    		Screenshot:

    Download

    Download dragonDraughts for windows v2.4.1 (06-07-2005, 7 Mb)
    Installation instructions: If Dragon does not start with the 3d-board, make sure that you have installed DirectX from Microsoft. If you have not installed directX 8 or later, dragon will use a 2d rather than the 3d-board. You can also download the old version (v1.2.5) if the new version gives you problems. v3.0beta version here

    System requirements:

    Changes:

    Other stuff available at this site:

  • Portable draughts notation. (PDN) is the international standard for interchanging draughts games for computer programs.
  • PDN databases A collection of 500 games in PDN format. New: Includes WC 2003
  • The draughts problem file format.
  • The dutch speed computer draughts championship 1995 The results.
  • The computer draughts championship 1996 In the Netherlands.
  • Position count Number of positions in international draughts.
  • Endgame database statistics Some statistics of dragon's endgame databases, with perfect play examples.
  • Some notes on techniques for computer program that play games. Explanation of words like hashtable etc.
  • Dragon programming tools Technical description of dragon draughts and the tools that were used to make it. Including full C source code of the draughts-engine.
  • Exact backgammon bearoff Computer program that does exact computations in backgammon bearoff positions.

    • links on draughts:

  • www.damserver.nl You can play international draughts against others on the internet trough a java applet. Mainly dutch players.
  • Damvereniging Denk En Zet Laren With over 700 links to draughts-related sites
  • Pogo.com Great site. You can play checkers against others on the internet trough a java applet
  • Pc solutions They sell the SAGE draughts program, which plays english and italian draughts. This also includes DYNAMO which plays 10x10, Pool, Spanish, Russian, Canadian and Brazilian draughts. Shareware versions for these and several other games are available.
  • Gamer Cafe Checkers Server Apparently the first internet checker server. Allows you to play against human and computer opponents. The site was offline the last time I cheched
  • Chinook home page Chinook is a checkers program, playing at world champion (or better) level. And you can play against it! Has excellent Papers on "endgame databases", "a world class checkers player" and more! They proved 8x8 checkers is a draw if you start from the default position
  • Harm Jetten's draughts program with freeware windows draughts program that runs in numerous languages. Includes endgame databases. (dutch site)
  • Rein Halbersma's draughts page
  • Frank Mesander Home Page Has written the program tornado. Website covers the DamExchange Protocol
  • Dutch teletext. Draughts is on page 614. (Sometimes)
  • Wieger Wesselink's page Has a Draughts Problem Server (more than 450 problems!)
  • the Internet Gaming Zone has support for checkers. There is no unix interface.
  • German Draughts Homepage (in English)
  • Buggy Online This program will play a second Man-Machine match against GMI N'Diaga Samb (world number 11). The event will be (was) held in France, March 10, 2003
  • 6th Computer olympiad, maastricht 18-23 aug 2001
  • Danican Open-source draughts program for linux.
  • American Checker Federation

    other (game research) links

  • www.icga.org Website of the International Computer Games Association.
  • GGTL (Generic Game-Tree Library) is a C library to help people program computer games.
  • M.Sc. Thesis: Parallel Search of Narrow Game Trees Applied to checkers.
  • Dennis Breuker's home page Papers on "Replacement Schemes for Transposition Tables", "How to mate: applying proof-number search."
  • John Tromp's home page with a perfect playing connect 4 program.
  • Ralph Gasser papers on "NMM", "exhaustive search", "the 15 puzzle".
  • Lewis Stiller, 6 piece chess endgame databases, 900 references, database generator (for the CM)
  • Victor Allis, In one word: Great, papers on pn-search, qubic, go-moku, connect-4, dependency-based search, future of games.
  • "Best play for imperfect players and game tree search" (postscript 800 Kb) by Eric Baum and Warren Smith.
  • Machine Learning in Games
  • Aske Plaat tree search, "New Advances in Alpha-Beta Searching"
  • Paper on diminishing reutrn for additional search and other papers.
  • Velena A perfect connect4 player for dos.
  • Richard's Play-By-eMail Server play abstract games by email.
  • MindSports. Play various abstract games in java. (chess, checkers, hexdame, congo etc.)
  • Michael Buro. His program recently beat the human champion in Othello 6-0.
  • Mathematical sciences research instituteSeveral video's of abstract games workshops, such as dots & boxes.

    • Newsgroups:

    There is no draughts/checkers newsgroup, but sometimes there are discussions on:
  • comp.ai.games Artificial intellegence
  • rec.games.abstract This is the preferred group. The group is intented for discussion about (computer) games which almost nobody knows, e.g. trax or hex and (mathematical) games in general.
  • rec.games.board
  • rec.games.chess.misc
  • rec.games.chess.computer

    • unrelated links

  • Easy Job Timer One of my shareware programs. Easy job timer is a timing application that allows you to track the time you spend on tasks for clients or other activities. The application is intended to be very easy to use.
  • My home page (which has nothing to do with draughts)
  • De eerste nederlandsche verzekeringen. A dutch insurance company


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    ,  Last updated on: July 31, 2007