Games

Chess

Chess on a lacquered board with turned ivory and ebony chessmen: castling, en passant, promotion, check and mate, stalemate and the draws by repetition, by the fifty-move rule and for lack of material. Play the computer at five levels, from a beginner who leaves pieces hanging to a searcher that looks several moves deep and follows every exchange to its end, play a friend, or watch a demo game.

By Mykhailo Makarov

Actual application image

What happens

The rules of chess in full: castling on either side while neither the king nor the rook has moved and the king does not pass through check, en passant capture of a pawn that has just advanced two squares, promotion to a piece chosen in the panel, check, checkmate and stalemate. A game is drawn by the third repetition of a position, after fifty moves by each side without a capture or a pawn move, or when neither side has the material to mate. The computer is the 3D Chess searcher grown up: iterative deepening with a time limit, captures ordered most valuable victim first, a quiescence search that follows the exchanges at the leaves, and an evaluation of material and piece-square tables. The weaker levels choose among moves close to the best.

Try this

Click a piece, then the square to move it to. The right mouse button turns the table, the wheel zooms.

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Games

Go

The oldest board game still played: place stones to surround more of the board than your opponent, take the stones you enclose, and count the area at the end. Boards of 9, 13 and 19 lines, handicap stones, ko and superko, area scoring with komi. Play the computer at five levels, from a novice that plays out a few hundred random games before each move to a master that plays out up to two hundred thousand across the processor’s cores, play a friend at the same table, or watch the computer play itself.

Games

Backgammon and nardy

Long nardy, the game of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and short nardy, known in the West as backgammon, on a walnut board with ivory and ebony checkers and dice that tumble to rest. Every legal way to play a roll is offered step by step; the computer judges positions with the small neural networks of 3D Nardy, taught by playing itself, at five levels from a novice that misjudges on purpose to a master that looks a roll ahead. Play the computer, a friend at the same table, or watch a demo game.

Games

Billiards

Pool and Russian billiards from 3D Billiards: eight-ball and nine-ball on a nine-foot pool table, and the free pyramid of Russian billiards on a twelve-foot table with pockets barely wider than the balls. The balls slide, roll and spin, throw each other off line and come off cushions struck above their middles in an exact event-driven simulation, and the aim lines show where they will go. Aim with the mouse, draw the cue back and let go. The computer plans its shots through the ghost ball, plays them out to see where the balls stop and plays safe when nothing will drop, at five levels. Play the computer or a friend, practise alone, or watch a demo game.