xDama (Checkers AI)

♟️ xDama - Minimax Checkers Bot

This is a legacy project from my first year of Computer Science at University. It is a competitive algorithm for Dama (Checkers) that reads from a .txt file and outputs the optimal next move.

🧠 The Core Algorithm

The brain of the bot is powered by the Minimax algorithm with Alpha-Beta pruning, evaluating board states up to a depth of 4 to predict the opponent’s moves and select the best path to victory.

🛠️ Developer’s Retrospective

I intentionally keep this repository untouched as a historical snapshot of my learning process. Looking back at this code today, it’s a perfect example of how I initially approached C++ coming from a C mindset:

• The Good: It implements the Pimpl Idiom (Pointer to Implementation) to hide internal state, and a fully functional Minimax algorithm from scratch. It handles memory allocation and custom doubly-linked lists without relying on external libraries.
• What I would change today: As a first-year student, I manually managed memory with raw new and delete instead of using modern C++ smart pointers (std::unique_ptr) or STL containers like std::vector. I also used macro #define heavily instead of modern constexpr.

🚀 Build & Run

Ensure you have make and a C++ compiler installed.

# Compile the project
make

# Run the bot (Player 1)
make run

# Run memory leak checks (requires valgrind)
make valgrind

# Clean build artifacts
make clean