Splix.io - Controller

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1:54 PM

I've done some searching, and I think Reversi might be a good game to try.

Reversi is a strategy board game for two players, played on an 8×8 uncheckered board. There are sixty-four identical game pieces called disks (often spelled "discs"), which are light on one side and dark on the other. Players take turns placing disks on the board with their assigned color facing up. During a play, any disks of the opponent's color that are in a straight line and bounded by the disk just placed and another disk of the current player's color are turned over to the current player's color. The object of the game is to have the majority of disks turned to display your color when the...

Nathan Merrill

yeah. Beware that there are lots of existing AIs for it, though

J Atkin

I think that could be somewhat mitigated by uping the board size. Or not allowing any external deps.

Nathan Merrill

I'm not worried about people calling other people's code, its more about people looking up the algorithms and simply implementing them

you aren't going to have many people coming up with their own algorithms

J Atkin

Is this something you've come across before?

I looked through the sandbox, and you have some really good challenges. Do you not have enough time to write the controllers?

Nathan Merrill

I often get uninterested in them :)

J Atkin

2:00 PM

Hehe, I understand ;)

Nathan Merrill

Q: Chess Tournament

This is a chess-KOTH with simplified rules (because chess itself is already complicated, playing it via a simple program doesn't make it easier). At the moment it is limited to java (version 8), but creating a wrapper-class isn't that difficult (in case someone wants to do this). Chessboard The...

notice who won: it was doing alpha-beta pruning. Which is an algorithm that's been around for a long time.

people still enjoyed the challenge

but assuming you get a good number of answers, (which with reversi, I imagine you would), I guarantee you're going to get a pretty standard algorithm tweaked a bit that wins

but assuming you're ok with that, Reversi is a perfect fit for KoTHs

J Atkin

Interesting. Thanks for the tip!

Nathan Merrill

it's easy to explain, its popular, it's turn-based, it has 2 players

J Atkin

I'll look through your koth's again, maybe something will jump out at me. The other idea is to look at alternatives to plain chess. Antichess, atomic ches, chess 360. All of those are very fun to play and have less AI research than actual chess, but they arn't as well known. I think that was the problem with my antichesss post.

Q: Play Antichess!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess This is basically Chess Tournament, but for antichess ;) Antichess is one of the many chess variants that have been invented. The goal is to lose all your pieces (this may seem a little odd, but it's called antichess for a reason). The rules The rul...

king-of-the-hill chess board-game

The challenge would be to have a very easy to understand explanation of how the game works as opposed to regular chess. Requiring a simple variant.

Nathan Merrill

Yeah. One of things about Antichess/Reversi/Chess, and so on is that they are perfect information games.

Which means that generally, alpha-beta pruning will pretty much always be the answer

J Atkin

2:11 PM

Although I'm not entirely familiar with AB pruning (I only looked at the first wikipedia paragraph ;) It appears that AB pruning would be ineffective with Reversi, because the board state is very difficult to put a value on.

Nathan Merrill

Computer Othello

Computer Othello refers to computer architecture encompassing computer hardware and computer software capable of playing the game of Othello. == Availability == There are many Othello programs such as NTest, Saio, Edax, Cassio, Pointy Stone, Herakles, WZebra, and Logistello that can be downloaded from the Internet for free. These programs, when run on any up-to-date computer, can play games in which the best human players are easily defeated. This is because although the consequences of moves are predictable for both computers and humans, computers are better at envisaging them. == Sear...

look under "Evaluation Techniques"

J Atkin

That's really cool. I never thought about the corner/next to corner pieces value. And I've played Reversi quite a bit. The 10x10 section was left blank, which I thought was interesting. That may be a way to prevent existing AI from being incorporated, if I wanted to do that.

Nathan Merrill

that's for solving othello

solving a 10x10 game of othello is far beyond our current computing powers

J Atkin

Oh, duh ;)

I missed the heading :/

Nathan Merrill

@JAtkin oh, corners are easily the most important square of the board

they give you so much power

when I play, I always try to tempt other players into to playing next to a corner

because after that, its basically a win for me

J Atkin