Welcome to my first “state of the site” forum post! I hope to do these regularly to keep you abreast of current developments and future plans. This one is duplicated on the news page.
CheckerCruncher is entering public beta! It works reasonably well in the major browsers at desktop resolutions. It’s got a database of 22,000 games, 2700 tactics problems, and 10 friends testing it. There are lots of features I still want to add but the puzzles are both interesting and fun. I’ve routinely found myself playing checkers instead of programming and it’s past time to show it to a wider audience and get some feedback from strangers on the internet. I’m both excited and nervous.
The heart of the site is the problem generator; it scans the database of games looking for problems, builds the solutions, and saves them to the database for users to practice on. These problems are the core experience of the site so every improvement helps. I’d love to hear your feedback both about the problems and the site. I know a little about game programming but almost nothing about checkers so the heuristics it uses are crude and some of the puzzles it builds are ugly.
The worst are the ones with with lots of winning lines like problem 20, some of which are crushing but the computer wants only the fastest win. Try-again, try-again, try-again, try-again, wrong you lose, is extremely frustrating. I’ll disable these as I find them, point them out on the forum. I can’t give you your points back but I can spare someone else the same pain.
Others like 640 end too early which can be confusing or like 263 go too long ending with a whimper instead of a bang. These types of errors I can’t do as much about yet because they’re so common. Still, I’ll disable the most egregious examples if people hate them.
The best problems (and there are lots of these!) are ones where it gives you the satisfaction of finishing the combination and then ends. Problems like 127 are a joy to play. I think these are great at revealing the depth and beauty inherent in the game of checkers. They’re also fantastic learning tools, my play has improved a great deal from these problems. I hope you enjoy solving them as much as I have building them.
Some of my favorites:
The next iteration of the generator will be more discriminating in the positions it turns into puzzles. This should avoid generating most of the frustrating puzzles with lots of ‘try again’ lines. It will also be smarter about choosing where to end the puzzles. But before I get to building that there are a lot of features I want to add for the current problem set. Some of my ideas are listed below but please share your own ideas, I want to hear them.
Possible improvements in the next few weeks/months.
- Problems selected by rating instead of randomly.
- Piece movement sounds.
- Better mobile and browser support.
- Better user statistics.
- Thousands more problems.
- Showing common errors from other users.
More difficult Ideas that I’ll pursue as time permits.
- Difficulty settings.
- Problem comments, tags, and star ratings.
- Leader boards.
- Different piece sets.
So that’s where it’s at. This site has taken two years to build and I’m super excited to start sharing it. I think it’s already a wonderful learning tool and there are tons of improvements still coming. Please enjoy it and let me know what you’d like to see changed. Good luck!
Regards,
Brooks.