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Marion Franklin Tinsley was an American mathematician and checkers player. He is widely considered to be the greatest checkers player ever. Tinsley was world champion from 1955–1958 and from 1975–1991 and never lost a world championship match. He lost only seven games from 1950 until his death in 1995. He withdrew from championship play during the years 1958–1975, relinquishing the title during that time. Derek Oldbury, sometimes considered the second-best player of all time, thought that Tinsley was "to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what Michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music."
Checkers, also known as draughts, is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".
International draughts is a strategy board game for two players, one of the variants of draughts. The gameboard comprises 10×10 squares in alternating dark and light colours, of which only the 50 dark squares are used. Each player has 20 pieces, light for one player and dark for the other, at opposite sides of the board. In conventional diagrams, the board is displayed with the light pieces at the bottom; in this orientation, the lower-left corner square must be dark.
Jonathan Herbert Schaeffer is a Canadian researcher and professor at the University of Alberta and the former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence.
American Pool Checkers, also called "American Pool", is a variant of draughts, mainly played in the mid-Atlantic and Southeastern United States and in Puerto Rico.
English draughts or checkers, also called straight checkers or simply draughts, is a form of the strategy board game checkers. It is played on an 8×8 checkerboard with 12 pieces per side. The pieces move and capture diagonally forward, until they reach the opposite end of the board, when they are crowned and can thereafter move and capture both backward and forward.
Lasca is a draughts variant, invented by the second World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker (1868–1941). Lasca is derived from English draughts and the Russian draughts game bashni (Towers).
Chinook is a computer program that plays checkers. It was developed between the years 1989 to 2007 at the University of Alberta, by a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer and consisting of Rob Lake, Paul Lu, Martin Bryant, and Norman Treloar. The program's algorithms include an opening book which is a library of opening moves from games played by checkers grandmasters; a deep search algorithm; a good move evaluation function; and an end-game database for all positions with eight pieces or fewer. All of Chinook's knowledge was programmed by its creators, rather than learned using an artificial intelligence system.
God's algorithm is a notion originating in discussions of ways to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle, but which can also be applied to other combinatorial puzzles and mathematical games. It refers to any algorithm which produces a solution having the fewest possible moves. The allusion to the deity is based on the notion that an omniscient being would know an optimal step from any given configuration.
Charles Clendell Walker was an American Mississippi state checkers champion and Christian minister. He founded the International Checker Hall of Fame in Petal, Mississippi in 1979. Walker is also known in checkers history for his record-setting victories in simultaneous checkers matches. In a January 1992 match that lasted over eight hours, he played 229 checkers games simultaneously. He won 227 contests, lost one and tied one. In 1994, he set a Guinness World Record while playing 306 checkers games simultaneously and losing only one.
Turkish draughts (Armenian: շաշկի)(Arabic: دامە)(Kurmanji: Dame) is a variant of draughts (checkers) played in Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and several other locations around the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East.
Russian draughts is a variant of draughts (checkers) played in Russia and some parts of the former USSR, as well as parts of Eastern Europe and Israel.
Amangul Berdieva is an English draughts and international draughts player from Turkmenistan. She is twice women's world champion of English draughts in both 3-Move and GAYP versions.
Martin Bryant is a British computer programmer known as the author of White Knight and Colossus Chess, a 1980s commercial chess-playing program, and Colossus Draughts, gold medal winner at the 2nd Computer Olympiad in 1990.
Armenian draughts, or Tama, is a variant of draughts played in Armenia. The rules are similar to Dama. Armenian draughts, however, allows for diagonal movement.
Dameo is an abstract strategy board game for two players invented by Christian Freeling in 2000. It is a variant of the game draughts and is played on an 8×8 checkered gameboard.
The World Checkers/Draughts Championship is the tournament of English draughts which determines the world champion. It is organised by the World Checkers/Draughts Federation. The first edition of the men's championship was held in the 1840s, predating the men's Draughts World Championship by several decades. The women's championship has been held since 1986. There are championships held in two versions. One is 3-Move, where players don't begin their game in the starting position but a position three moves in the game. The other is GAYP, where players start from the very beginning.
Elbert Lowder was an American checkers champion noted for dominating the "11-man ballot". He worked as a piano tuner and was from North Carolina. As one of the grandmasters who played against the Chinook program he is mentioned several times in Jonathan Schaeffer's book One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers. Elbert Lowder was a member of the United Methodist Church.
Bashni, also known as column draughts, multi-level checkers, and rarer Chinese checkers, is a variation of draughts, known in Russia since the 19th century. The game is played according to the basic rules of Russian draughts, with the main difference being that draughts being jumped over are not removed from the playing field but are instead placed under the jumping piece . The resulting towers move across the board as one piece, obeying the status of the upper draught. When a tower is jumped over, only the upper draught is removed from it. If, as a result of the combat, the top draught changes colour, ownership of the tower passes on to the opposing player. Based on Bashni, but according to the basic rules of English draughts, world chess champion Emanuel Lasker developed the draughts game "Laska" and, in 1911, published its description. Lasker described towers that can only be "double-layered": i.e. there can be no alternation of colors. He also showed that during the game the number of game pieces either remains constant or decreases. Column draughts are a subject of interest for the mathematical Sciences: combinatorics, theory of paired zero-sum games, etc.
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