Older Checkers Programs

[Ed Trice]

Does anyone have any of these programs?

A. Colossus Draughts or Colossus 95 Draughts
B. Nexus
C. Nemesis
D. Nemesis 2.0
E. Sage Draughts

Please let me know. Thanks.

[john reade]

I have Colossus. I was given a copy by Martin Bryant back in the 90's and I still use it.

[Ed Gilbert]

I you can get Sage from Alioto Domenico's web site: http://checkersprograms.altervista.org/Software.html

-- Ed

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

I have Colossus. I was given a copy by Martin Bryant back in the 90's and I still use it.

I'm sorry, please. And you can share this program.

Krzysztof

[Ed Trice]

I have Colossus. I was given a copy by Martin Bryant back in the 90's and I still use it.

Hi John,

Do you know if the pre-1995 version of Colossus had any endgame databases that came with the program? I think it had the 4-piece set before the Chinook team licensed the 6-piece database to Martin for Colossus Draughts 95. I'm trying to gather information about each of the early programs to document their db info for a paper I am in the process of writing.

Thank you.

[Ed Trice]

I you can get Sage from Alioto Domenico's web site: http://checkersprograms.altervista.org/Software.html

-- Ed

Hi Ed,

My antivirus software says this domain has been used to proliferate viruses and Trojan horses with its installation programs. Are you sure this is a safe site to visit? Anyone else ever have any such problems?

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Ed program Sage 9. 0 is in order.

Krzysztof.

[Ed Gilbert]

I have known Alioto for a long time. He is an active player and an active supporter of checkers programs. I would be very surprised if he intentionally put harmful programs on his web site. I have downloaded Sage from his site and used it in the past, but not recently.

-- Ed

[John Acker]

I just downloaded the Sage file from Alioto's site. It is virus-free and malware-free, but the program does default to an Italian-language interface. To change it to English, select "Schermata" (fourth from the left) and then "Lingua: Inglese."

[Ed Trice]

I have known Alioto for a long time. He is an active player and an active supporter of checkers programs. I would be very surprised if he intentionally put harmful programs on his web site. I have downloaded Sage from his site and used it in the past, but not recently.

-- Ed

This is what I see from Microsoft Edge in Windows 10:



It may be that Alioto is not doing this, of course, but rather other people are using the domain for nefarious purposes. I'll download the file and check it out.

[Ed Gilbert]

Do you know if the pre-1995 version of Colossus had any endgame databases that came with the program? I think it had the 4-piece set before the Chinook team licensed the 6-piece database to Martin for Colossus Draughts 95. I'm trying to gather information about each of the early programs to document their db info for a paper I am in the process of writing.

Page 1 of this paper by Martin Bryant has the details of Colosus endgame db in 1993. http://checkersusa.com/books/straight/B ... r_1993.pdf

-- Ed

[Ed Trice]

Page 1 of this paper by Martin Bryant has the details of Colosus endgame db in 1993.
-- Ed

Thanks Ed. So the answer to my question was Colossus had the 2-,3-,4- and part of the 5-piece databases computed prior to getting the 6-piece database from the Chinook team.

Also very interesting to read that the Colossus search speed in 1993 on a 66 MHz computer was 26,000 nodes/second.

Kingsrow with its DB10 (original version) on my 4.5 GHz Intel i7-5960X with 128 GB of RAM reaches about 30 million/second from the opening position.