Play Chinook
Play against the World Checkers Champion!
Chinook won the World Championship in 1994, the first program to win a human world championship. This feat is recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records.
The program on this site is the champion but it has been reduced in strength to allow you to "have a chance" at drawing. This program does not include the solution to checkers (see the "Proof" link on the home page). If you are good enough, you might even win! Good luck!
Please read the following instructions:
- Read the brief primer about checkers notation.
- You will be playing Chinook with the 6 piece databases enabled (i.e. Chinook will have perfect knowledge for all positions with 6 or fewer pieces on the board).
- You may select one of three levels - novice, amateur, or intermediate. The amount of CPU time used by Chinook increases for each level.
- After submitting your move, Chinook should respond within a minute or so. Please be patient - response time depends upon network load, the load on our server, and the level you selected. If, for some reason, Chinook is hung, a time out message will appear about a minute after you submitted your last move. Otherwise, assume Chinook is thinking.
- You should submit your move within 3 minutes of Chinook's last response if you are playing the novice level, 4 minutes for amateur, and 6 minutes for intermediate. After this time, Chinook will abort your game if someone requests a game.
- In 8x8 English and American checkers, jumps are compulsory! Chinook will always print a menu of legal moves for your next move.
- Please submit your move from the current position (i.e. the most recent screen generated by Chinook). Any attempt to play a move from a different position will cause the game to be terminated.
- Please be courteous and enter Quit when you no longer want to continue playing. This causes the game to end without waiting for the timeout and enables a waiting player to begin play immediately. If you decide to play another game against Chinook, you may be asked to wait if someone requested to play during your last game.
- Please send comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc. to rob.lake@ualberta.ca.
