Computing Deep Perft and Divide Numbers for Checkers

Abstract

The perft method, originating from the chess programming community, has become a widespread way to test the correctness and performance of move generators. Although its usefulness diminishes with depth, computing deep perft numbers poses an interesting computational challenge by itself. This paper presents perft and corresponding divide numbers for American checkers up to depth 28 together with background on the distributed implementation used to compute deep numbers.