Endgame Databases

Chess endgame databases, while of important theoretical interest, have yet to make a significant impact in tournament chess. In the game of checkers, however, endgame databases have played a pivotal role in the success of our World Championship challenger program Chinook. Consequently, we are interested in building databases consisting of hundreds of billions of positions. Since database positions arise frequently in Chinook's search trees, the databases must be accessible in real-time. This does not yet happen in chess.

Query the databases.

The following links show the number of positions in checkers:

Chinook has perfect information for all checker positions involving 8 or fewer pieces on the board, a total of 443,748,401,247 positions. These databases are now available for download! Note that some of the following files are large. The total download size is almost 2.7 GB. Unzipped size is 5.6 GB.

If you prefer CDs, please contact jonathan@cs.ualberta.ca (we have to charge a nominal fee to cover costs).

Download the databases:

Database access code. Note that this code isn't as "nice" as it should be.