To LUGNET HomepageTo LUGNET News HomepageTo LUGNET Guide Homepage
 Help on Searching
 
Post new message to lugnet.off-topic.geekOpen lugnet.off-topic.geek in your NNTP NewsreaderTo LUGNET News Traffic PageSign In (Members)
 Off-Topic / Geek / 2735
2734  |  2736
Subject: 
Re: Brickgame [connect 4] algorithm
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Wed, 31 Jan 2001 19:29:20 GMT
Viewed: 
1871 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) (...) (26 years ago, 31-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

5 Messages in This Thread:


Entire Thread on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact
    

©2005 LUGNET. All rights reserved. - hosted by steinbruch.info GbR