History of My Checkers Game Software Development Using Machine Learning by James Pate Williams, Jr.

My history of developing artificially intelligent checkers applications began in the Winter Quarter of 1999 at Auburn University. I was taking a Machine Learning course taught by Professor Gerry V. Dozier. We used the textbook “Machine Learning” by Tom M. Mitchell. The first chapter of the now classic textbook is devoted to developing a framework for a checkers (draughts) game. Mitchell used an evaluation function with seven weights and a least mean squares training rule. Over the years I have expanded the number of weights to fourteen rules. I seem to recall my early efforts were in C and later Java. I began programming checkers and chess applications on a Palm Pilot in the Summer Semester of 2002 in the course Handheld Software Development taught by my PhD research advisor Professor Richard O. Chapman. This work was performed in Palm Pilot Operating System C programming language. I created a client server set of programs to operate over TCP/IP networks. I had a modem for my Palm Pilot and learned TCP/IP sockets programming on the Palm Pilot. I still have two volumes addressing Palm Pilot C programming. I created a C# checkers program beginning on October 19, 2017. I started creating a Win32 version of my C# application on October 27, 2022. Unfortunately, I cannot video capture a Win32 game using the Windows button followed by the letter G for Game Boy. The program has five dialogs and apparently Windows-G buttons do not record dialogs. You can find a video of the computer playing against the computer on my Facebook page. I show the main dialog of the Win32 application in this blog.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

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