

The objective of the game is to move all of ones marbles into the home area of one's opponent before one's opponent moves all his marbles into one's own home area.

Home area of a player consist of positions 1 to 10 that of its opponent 112 to 121. The intermediate steps of a sequence of jumps, however, may use positions in the neutral zones.ĩ9 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111įigure 1: Board positions are numbered 1 to 121. When a marble is moved to an adjacent position, or takes a sequence of jumps, it may not end up in a position in a neutral zone. The jump is only allowed if every position on the line AC (inclusive) exists, and none of these are occupied before the jump except A and B. The former will land at position C, where B is equidistance from A and C, and A, B, and C are colinear. Suppose the marble at A jumps over a marble at B. Each jump must be made according to the following rule. A marble may also in one move make a sequence of jumps over other marbles, which either belong to the player or his opponent. At each turn, a player can move any one of his marbles into a neighboring position, provided that such a position exists and is not already occupied by another marble, either belonging to him or his opponent.

Since the board is embedded in a hexagonal grid, each position on it is generally connected to neighbors in six directions, except when located at the boundary or a corner, in which case the position has 5, 4, or 2 neighbors. The four other triangular areas are called neutral zones. At the beginning of a game, each player's ten marbles occupy a triangular area at an opposite side of the board. There are 121 positions on the board and they are numbered from 1 to 121 as shown in Figure 1. The game is played on a six-pointed star-shape board by two players. Note however that we have defined more precisely the criteria for winning, and adopted a time limit for the programs to make its moves, which are intended to make the games more interesting. Thus the rules are here only for reference purposes and should correspond to everyone's understanding of the game. Specifically, we will adopt for the contest the simpliest version of the game in which the objective is to move all of ones marbles across the board as quickly as possible. This document describes the rules of Chinese checkers and the protocol understood by the mediator program.Įveryone must have played Chinese checkers at one time or another. While teams compete in the programming contest, at another location of the contest site a competition will be held for Chinese checkers playing programs, which are to be written and submitted before contest day.ĭuring each game, two Chinese checkers playing programs, executing as separate processes on personal computers or workstations running Unix, play against each other using a common protocol mediated by the organizer's ``mediator program'' executing as yet another process. Introduction to Chinese Checkers CompetitionĪ computer Chinese checkers competition will be held during the 1997 Annual ACM Hong Kong Chapter Scholastic Programming Contest. 1997 ACM Hong Kong Chapter Computer Chinese Checkers Competition Rules 1997 ACM Hong Kong Chapter Computer Chinese Checkers Competition
