
README - Fri Oct  6 09:53:27 MEST 2000 - Don Dez 16 15:42:13 CET 2004

cake is a fork of version 1.4 of Martin Fierz' checkers program by
the same name. its not as strong as current versions available from
his site, but it will be a challenge to most casual players.

cake uses the Chinook database for perfect endgame information and
also makes use of this in interior nodes. It uses the same bitboard
representation for the position as the Chinook endgame database.

The 4-piece database is included in this distribution. It can also
use the 6-piece database, but you will have to get it separately
(eg. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/Software/software.html.)

For the curious: Cake++ is basically a negamax-based program along
with the usual enhancements:

* Transposition table
* Move Ordering, static and dynamic with transposition table moves,
  killer moves and history heuristic
* Selective extensions on forced moves and quiescence search,
  forward pruning in hopeless-looking positions
* Tree size reduction with enhanced transposition cutoffs


                                INSTALLATION
     _________________________________________________________________   

To compile the sources, install binaries and run the application type
(if you are on a big endian system, look at the Makefile first,)

    make                   #     start compilation
    ./cake                 #     test binaries
    su (yr.secret)         #     get root privileges
    make install           #     install binaries, database
                           #       \ and man pages
    exit                   #       \ for systemwide execution
    cake                   #     run the application

and cake will prompt you several things. Type p<enter>b<enter>1<enter>
to play a new game with you on the black side, giving cake about as 
little as a second time to compute its moves. You will have to be a
good player though, in order to win.

     _________________________________________________________________

http://arton.cunst.net/xcheckers/ holds a source distribution suitable
to compile on a number of *nix like operating environments.

It also works on win32 with at least the free Borland compiler
(http://www.inprise.com/bcppbuilder/freecompiler/) or alternately
the minimalist set of gnu tools: http://www.mingw.org/

     _________________________________________________________________   

cake is free software, for details see accompanying file COPYING.
cake is the work of Martin Fierz. http://www.fierz.ch/checkers has
the latest details on it.

