Compator

Compator courses

Draughts AI

A series of beginner courses. Each one teaches one kind of AI by adding it to the same draughts (English checkers) web app, and every course page includes the full code listings.

  1. Series overview

    Draughts AI Series: Follow-on Courses

    How the courses fit together, what each one teaches, and the order to take them in.

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  2. Course 1

    Building an AI Draughts Game for the Web

    Search. Build a draughts web app with a minimax computer opponent and a daily scoreboard, then publish it on Apache2.

    Read the course Play the demo

  3. Companion course

    Source Control with GitHub: Web, Command Line and VS Code

    Git and GitHub, using the draughts projects as the example: commits, branches, pull requests and deploying from GitHub.

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  4. Course 2

    Course 2: The AI Coach

    A language model with tool use. A coach that answers questions about the game by calling the engine for every fact.

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  5. Course 3

    Course 3: The AI Learns

    Machine learning. Self-play, hill climbing and a small neural network that replace the hand-written scoring rule.

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  6. Course 4

    Course 4: An Opponent That Adapts

    Learning from real players. Elo ratings, matching each player to a computer level, and an A/B test.

    Read the course Play the demo

  7. Course 5

    Course 5: Building an Agent Framework

    Agents. A small agent framework built from scratch, with tools, checks, human approval and traces, then compared with LangChain.

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Code available on request.