Latest Version : 1.5a

Download IMR-Checkers shareware version

You can now purchase the Full-Version of IMR-Checkers at these places

Tucows PilotZone has rated IMR-Checkers with 5 stars/cows/pilots :)

ZDNet's PalmPilotSoftware.com has rated IMR-Checkers with 5 stars

ZDNe'ts "Hot File Of The Day" on 06-04-1999

Palm Boulevard   BEST AWARDS

How do you contact me ?

check out http://ohad.visual-i.com

Checkers is a nice game!

Therefore it must have a Pilot version...

Very simple logic behind the making of this game :)

What is Checkers ?

Checkers is a nice board game, Checkers is the american name for 'British Draughts'.

What is IMR ?

IMR is a part of the IIC, the IMR International Corporation.

How do I play Checkers ?

• A man may only move or take 1 place diagonal to the opponents side.
• A King may only move or take 1 place diagonal to both sides.
• If a man reaches the opponents side, he becomes a king.
• If a player can't make a move, he loses the match.

Where can I get IMR-Checkers ?

You can download it from the following web-sites :

http://ohad.visual-i.com/pilot/ickr/ickr.htm
http://www.palmpilotgear.com
http://www.palmcentral.com
http://www.pilotzone.com

in the last 3 sites enter 'IMR' or 'Checkers' in the search field and you will be lead automatically to the game.

Why is IMR-Checkers Shareware ?

Because I've been working on this game for a long time now.

Whats the difference between the Shareware and Registered version ?

Board-State is not saved between sessions, this means that if you leave IMR-Checkers and go to an other program, when you come back, the Pilot will automatically start a new game for you. In the registered version the board-state is saved between sessions.

• Preferences are not saved between sessions, this means anything you've set in the Properties section will ve reset to its default everytime you start-up IMR-Checkers.
• There is no 'Undo'.
• You cannot start an Opening-Game.
• You cannot use the SetUp-Board feature.
• You cannot force the Pilot to make a move.
• The shareware version has a 3 second shareware-nag-screen when it loads everytime.

As you can see several new features are disabled in the shareware version, but this comes because the 7-game limit was removed (on version 1.5). This means you can play as much as you want, which is more than 7 games :), but the above mentioned options will remain disabled untill you register the software, should you decide to do so.

What do i get for registering IMR-Checkers ?

You get :

The Registered version which has all the nice features mentioned in the above paragraph
Tech-Support
Free Updates of IMR-Checkers v1 Revisions/Fixes/Updates (And they keep on comming at you :).
Anything else we can come up with :).

Cool, I want the Registered Version, how do I purchase it ?

Great, click on this link, and you will be brought to an online purchasing site..

Does IMR-Checkers support multiple-eats during the same move ?

As of version 1.1, Yes :)

Whats that on my screen ?

1. Your Units.
2. The Pilot's Units.
3. Blocks you can move to.
4. The Pilot's Last Move.
5. Pilot 'Think-Bar'.
6. Amount of Black-Pieces.
7. Amount of White-Pieces.
8. Pilot Attitude. (click it to change the attitude)
9. Control Buttons.
10. Pilot Intelligence. (click it to change the intelligence)

Note : This is a shot of the standard board, its also possible to play in the 'Big-Board' mode, just click on 'menu->Config->Board Size' or draw a '/B' on the grafitti area.

What's this 'Setup Board' screen ?

Using the 'Setup Board' feature you can start playing from any possible board position.

Just click the gray blocks to change their content from Black pieces, to White piece to Kings (both black and white :).

You can quickly clear the entire board by clicking the 'Clear Board' button at the bottom of the screen,
And you can quickly set the standard board by clicking the 'New Board' button at the bottom of the screen.

What are Opening Moves ?

When a Tournament / Professioanl Game is taking place, games don't usually start with letting one of the sides do the first move.

Opening moves are a set of 174 Opening Series (3 Moves each). When a game would begin, the referry would take a deck of cards, split it, and draw a card. The card would tell which move out of the 174 the game would begin with.

Then, the 3 moves are initiated and then the game begins, to make things even, once the game is over the next game begins where the opposite side starts with the same opening.

Some of hte openings are very challanging and the target is to get a draw, but these are for pro's only :)

Whats in the dialog, you can choose 'I Start' or 'Pilot Starts', this will determine who starts the 1'st move in the 3-move-series.

Opening #: x, this detemines what move-series of the 174 move series is to be executed, the field is automatically filled with a random value, so that you can just click 'Lets Rock' and start an opening game. If you want a specific opening just write it in and Rock on'.

Click 'Lets Rock' to start an opening-game according to your settings, or 'Forget It' to get back to your current ongoing game.

What do all the preferences mean ?

Lets take a look at hte preferences...

• Sound Efects - Hard one to guess.
• Must Eat If Can - I'm not sure if this is an official law, or a twisted version of the official law, but anyhows it says that if one of your units has the opportiunity to eat one of the enemie's units, it has to. Same goes for the enemy.
• Show Valid Moves - When you select a unit, if its your unit and it CAN move, a black rectangle will appear around it. If 'Show Valid Moves' is enabled, all the block into which this unit can move will be marked with a cripple 'x' mark.
• Show A.I Movements - This is one for the coders. The Pilot uses MinMaxi'ng to find the best possible move, along this 'tree-scanning' he performs many many moves and evaluates the board. If you enable 'Show A.I Movements' you will see all the movements the computer does and all the board states he reaches. This is most interesting at Level - 3 where the computer
  reaches 4 levels deep (yes 4 not 3), you can really see him planning and ealuating a long way in. Note : on high levels (level 3 for instance) this can slow down the 'thinking' proceess significantly.
• 1-Click Multiple-Eat - When this feature is on, when you have a situation when you can perform a multiple eat/jump, you just click the last position your piece will reach and the Pilot will perform the move-sequence for you. Sometimes, you have several ways to reach a position, and the Pilot won't always choose the passage you prefer, so just disable this feature, perform your long-move, and then enable it back again.
• Multiple-Eat Backwards - Some people don't like it that their Kings jump backwards while doing a long-eat (multiple-eat), by default this Flag is set ON, which allows kings to multiple-eat-backwards, if you don't like this simple disable this flag. Note that pawns can never eat backwards during a long (multiple) eat.
• Professional Notation - So you'r really into checkers, you must be used to the standard 1-32 checkers notation, now you can have it. When this option is set-on the notation used to display your moves and the Pilots moves will be a 1-32 instead of the 'ChessLike' 1-8/A-F. Now not only will the notation be used to display your moves, but the board itself will be numbered.
• Pilot Intelligence - Determines how 'smart' the Pilot is, 1 is not far from the IQ of a hamster, 2 has the brain of your average octopus, level 3 gets smarter, and level 4 even more.
• Pilot Attitude - Yes, another cool option. This REALLY determines the Pilot's attitude, wether he'll be Defensive keeping his back row, trying not to loose units at all, or be Offensive and ...

Ok, Now tell me all the cool stuff about the Computer Artificial Intelligence...

Ahh, I'm so happy you asked.

It goes like this, IMR-Checkers uses the standart MinMax algorithm, reaches depths 1, 2, 3, 4.
The Evaluation function has no less than 9 factors.
Due to the fact that IMR-Checkers can't get too deep in the tree, the evaluation function takes into consideration several aspects that compensate for this.
It uses Alpha-Beta pruning to speed up the deep level scanning, but uses it only on one side, this eliminates the possibility of mischoosing the 'best-move'.
It has 3 playing modes : Offensive, Normal and Aggresive, all 3 of them are different implementations of the evluation function. All co-efficients were composed after a period of beta-testing and heuristic evluation.
Cool :)

What ? I want more Artifical-Intelligence stuff...

Well, me too :)
The problem is that the Pilot is a pretty limited machine when approaching large-scale computations.

There still is one thing I'm determined to Implement, and thats 'Shallow Sorting' (Don't you just love these meaningless sentences :)

What does Shallow Sorting do you ask ? It tries to sort the move-list from Best to Worst so that the Alpha-Beta-Pruning process can eliminate most of the moves. This could be really cool, as in a large speed increment. I tried implementing this, but there's simply not enough Stack for all this, so I'll have to restructure IMR-Checkers to use some dynamic memory allocation (something I haven't dealt with on the Pilot).

Tell me what was the difference between all IMR-Checkers Versions...

Version 1.5a :

• Added documentation to the preferences.
• Fixed minor bug, after an opening where the pilot started and the user ended in a position he can make an eat, and 'Must Eat If Can' was turned on, the user could still 'not eat'. damn those small bugs :)

Version 1.5 :

• Professional Openings, 174 of them. Let the Palm choose   Randomly or start a specific one, you can also choose who start's the opening game.
• Professional Checkers Notation + OnBoard Checkers Notation.
• Game Statistics.
• New Shortcut System (fixes some screen bugs), just jot 'N' on the Grafitti area to start a new game instead of '/N'. (Thanks Scott-Ludwig)
• Clicking the Right-Sided White-Pawn issues a 'Force Pilot Move' event.
• Fixed Early Pilot surrender bug.
• Improved Undo mechanism, Less memory consumption.
• Multiple-Eat-Backwards option now affects only Kings, Pawns can never eat backwards.

Version 1.4 :

• Added Difficulty Level 5, very slow.
• Thinking Bar now Shows 'Time Left For Computer To Think'.
• Clicking Attitude Face switches attitude.
• Clicking Pilot Level Display (Top Right Corner) advances the Pilot Level by 1.

Version 1.3 :

• Speeded up Pilot Player, Especially level 3 (speeded it up by about 500%).
• Re-Structured Evaluation Process or in other words 'Pilot is smarter than ever'.
• Added the menu-item 'Force Pilot Move', this allows the player to have the Pilot start the game, or start playing after a board-setup.
• Added display of chosen Difficulty Level in top right screen corner.

Version 1.2 :

• Added the option to disable backwards eating during a multiple/long-eat.
• Highly improved Pilot Intelligence, especially on level 2 which is the default level played.

Version 1.1 :

• The game now allows Multiple-Eating.
• Faster-Smarter Pilot Opponent.
• Setup-Board option.
• Several Bug-Fixes.

Version 1.0 :

IMR-Checkers was released.

contect copyright - The IMR Corporation MCMxxxxx C.