The Turk

NOTE: TheTurk's new home: http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/TheTurk/

Contents of this Page

Book Cover
Our supervisor, Jonathan Schaeffer, wrote One Jump Ahead - the story about Chinook, the current World Checkers Champion. It is now available from Springer-Verlag.
So, you want to be crushed by Chinook? Give it a try - but be warned, Chinook is not half as forgiving as TheTurk! :)

Play a Game against The Turk!


Computer plays: Black    WHITE:
Display type (HELP): STANDARD:    JAVA (mouse enabled):    MOSAIC:
Compute Time:

Bugs, comments, donations and flowers to: yngvi@cs.ualberta.ca.

Resume an old game against The Turk!

If you can give me the game ID of the game we can resume playing at the last position. However, two days after your last move we remove your game and you will not be able to access it anymore!

Bugs, comments, donations and flowers to: yngvi@cs.ualberta.ca.

Why are we doing all this?

This page is NOT just fun! There is serious research connected to it, even though some might say, only remotely... This page is the tip of the iceberg you can see, the "face" of our research project. This project has two goals: By playing our program, you will not only have fun and see how it develops (if you keep coming back once in a while), but moreover you will help us to find its strengths and most importantly, weaknesses (or even bugs)!

This is why we want to thank you for playing The Turk!


Who are the people behind The Turk?

The people involved in this project are

Features of The Turk

The program is a joint effort of mostly Yngvi and Andreas with advice given by Jonathan and Tony. Here are some of the current features:

Some Statistics about The Turk

The program is on the web since October 1995. We started with 3 to 5 games played a day and currently record between 100 and 200 games a day, of which about 60 to 70 percent are serious games, the rest are people just checking it out, playing 10 moves, being crushed and leave :). We estimate that The Turk wins about 90 percent of the serious games, which is really rough, since we aren't quite sure what a serious game really means...
We serve about 3500 requests every day. A request being a move to be made by The Turk, a request for a new game, or any other interaction playing a game.
We are running The Turk on a DEC 3000/400S with 32 MB of memory. The 3400 has a DEC 21064/133-MHz CPU with a 512 Kbyte cache. There is no simple relationship between the clock speeds on Alpha chips and Pentiums -- a clock is not a measure of performance. This SPECint92 is 74.7 and SPECfp92 is 112.2 (for comparison the Intel Pentium/133 numbers are 147.5 and 109.6 respectively).
Strength of TheTurk: We have no Elo rating for TheTurk. But we find, that players around 2000 Elo points have difficulties winning TheTurk in 5 and up seconds settings. If you win TheTurk really easily, you either play a lot against computers and know their weaknesses very well, or you are really a damn good player :).

Features of the WWW interface of The Turk


Other programs you can play against

The following is a non-exhaustive list of programs that you can play against, similarly as against TheTurk. Note: there are also sites where you can play against flesh-and-blood opponents - maybe you want to check those out too???

How to report problems with The Turk?

We appreciate EVERY report about problems, even if we just point you to some minor problem on your side. Usually we get back to everybody having problems with The Turk. Particularly new technical developments being on the market for about a month or so is a busy time for us. We know about every new browser within a week, every new internet provider within days. If you have a problem please provide us with as much of the following information as possible:

Bugs of The Turk we know of

Send them to: yngvi@cs.ualberta.ca.

You are visitor: to this page since August 15, 1995.


Last Modified: February 12, 1998