Welcome to Chinook, a world championship checkers program developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Chinook is the by-product of a research effort started in 1989 into game-playing strategies. This project has had two goals:

A short-range objective of developing a program capable of defeating the human World Champion in a match.
A long-term objective of solving the game of checkers, i.e. determining the game-theoretic value of checkers.

Here are some items of interest about Chinook:

Authors
Publications
Endgame Databases
World Championship Matches
WWW Wall of Honor
How about a game of checkers?
The Chinook Book

Here are some items of interest about checkers:

American Checker Federation
British Draughts Federation
The International Checker Hall of Fame
Grandmasters and Masters
Commercial Checker-Playing Programs
Checkers software (free!)
Collections of games
For sale
Computer Draughts and Checkers Page
Jim Loy's Checkers Pages

Chinook and Checker News Briefs:

July 15, 1996: Chinook wins the Southern States Tournament in Gilbertsville, Kentucky, ahead of Lowder, Laverty and Cooper. This was Chinook's first tournament in almost two years.
June 17, 1996: Jack Francis and Cornell Checkers were declared joint winners in the inaugural TOYOTA-ACER computer vs humans checkers tournament after their final on Saturday June 15 at Bridgetown, Barbados, ended in a 0-0 draw. The final of the four-game Three-Move Restriction match-up lasted 10 hours.
June 14, 1996: Chinook and checkers is featured in an article appearing in the June edition of Discover Magazine.
May 7, 1996: A friendly 20 game 11-man ballot mail match has begun between Chinook and Jerry Childers, the current World Mail Play Champion.
April 19, 1996: Elbert Lowder defeated Richard Hallett 5-4 with 11 draws in a 20 game stake match in Miami, Florida.
April 11, 1996: The United States Open 3-Move National Tournament will be held at the Howard Johnson Hotel in Danville, Virginia from November 11-16, 1996.
March 28, 1996: Ron King retains his Man vs. Man 3-Move World Championship title by tying his match with 5 wins each (and 30 draws) against challenger Don Lafferty. The title match took place from March 18-28 in Bridgetown, Barbados. Charles Walker and Jim Morrison were the referees.
November 12, 1995: Elbert Lowder wins the 1995 Kentucky Tournament.
October 16, 1995: In the United States versus Great Britain match held at the International Checker Hall of Fame in Petal, Mississippi, the score was 64 wins, 14 losses, and 122 draws in favor of the United States.
August 20, 1995: Jim Morrison wins the United States National Open Go-As-You-Please Tournament with 28 points.
August 12, 1995: Ron King wins the World Go-As-You-Please Championship by a score of 8 wins, 2 losses, and 9 draws over Elbert Lowder.
August 8, 1995: Point Survey has rated Chinook's home page in the top 5% of all sites on the Internet.
July 25, 1995: Elbert Lowder wins the Southern States Tournament with 22 points.
July 12, 1995: Chinook's endgame database now includes all 8 piece positions, bringing the total to 443,748,401,247 resolved positions.
May 20, 1995: Ron King, has officially challenged Chinook for the Man vs. Machine World Championship title.
April 17, 1995: News item from Time Magazine:
DIED. MARION TINSLEY, 68, math professor, world checkers champion and the first flesh-and-blood player to beat Chinook, a checkers-playing computer whose memory contains billions of positions; of cancer complications; in Humble, Texas.

You are visitor to Chinook's home page.

June 17, 1996