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Subject: 
Re: Brickgame [connect 4] algorithm
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Wed, 31 Jan 2001 19:29:20 GMT
Viewed: 
162 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.geek, Matthew Miller writes:
David Eaton <deaton@intdata.com> wrote:
Ok, I'm a geek. I admit that. But now that I've got that out of the way,
Anyway, that said, I've thought about writing (just for the heck of it) an
algorithm for playing it. It seems to be pretty good-- I can beat it mostly,
but usually it does a pretty good job, which rather suprised me, since it's
a fairly simplistic algorithm.

I remember reading some years ago that this game has actually been solved;
that is, there is a way for whoever goes first to win every time.

*does google search*

Yeah. Victor Allis of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

<http://www.cs.vu.nl/~victor/home.html>
<ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/victor/connect4.ps.Z>

Cool! I rather imagined that such might be possible-- And actually I suppose
it wouldn't be *all* that difficult to write an algorithm to prove so,
seeing that a game lasts no longer than 49 moves, and at each step, there
are a max of 8 moves. Rather unlike chess wherein there really isn't a
maximum amount of moves (although you could set a cap of, say, 1000 and be
pretty safe), and there's a max of somewhere around 200 moves... Certainly
because of the set limits, you wouldn't really have to evaluate the board at
each stage any more than "-1", "0", or "1", where "1" means "I win!", and
"-1" means, "I lose!"...

I'll have to sit down and check it out... Though since I never really
studied game theory, just AI a bit, who knows if I'll understand it at all :)

DaveE



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Brickgame [connect 4] algorithm
 
(...) I remember reading some years ago that this game has actually been solved; that is, there is a way for whoever goes first to win every time. *does google search* Yeah. Victor Allis of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. (URL) (...) (23 years ago, 31-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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