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What is the term for a stalemate in Checkers?

I was going to post this in StackOverflow, when I realized it really has nothing to do with programming. If it has a better home, please say so, so I can move it there.

I am making a basic Checkers game, and was setting up the game manager when I got to the method that gracefully ends the game. It would have taken in a boolean value, true signifying that player 1 has won, false signifying that player 2 has won. However, I realized that, in most games, there is the possibility of a stalemate, so I changed it to a byte, where x < 0 is player 1, x == 0 is a stalemate, and x > 0 is player 2. After that, i started contemplating whether Checkers can even have a stalemate. It seems like it's possible, but for the life of me, I can't come up with a scenario where the game ends and neither player wins. Is there any scenario, in the game of English Draughts (North American Checkers), where neither player wins the game, yet the game ends? Note that a forfeit on one player's part means that the other player wins.

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  • I believe the question I've linked to here answers your questions. If not, please let me know - and welcome to B&CG! – Pat Ludwig Jan 24 '12 at 05:27

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If you do not force capture then it's very possible, trivial even, to have a stalemate.

Even without though:

From wikipedia:

English draughts (American 8×8 checkers) has been the arena for several notable advances in game artificial intelligence. In the 1950s, Arthur Samuel created one of the first board game-playing programs of any kind. More recently, in 2007 scientists at the University of Alberta[13] evolved their "Chinook" program up to the point where it is unbeatable. A brute force approach that took hundreds of computers working nearly 2 decades was used to solve the game,[14] showing that a game of draughts will always end in a stalemate if neither player makes a mistake.[15][16] The solution is for the draughts variation called go-as-you-please (GAYP) checkers and not for the variation called three-move restriction checkers. As of December 2007, this makes English draughts the most complex game ever solved.

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