It thinks!

alex on 2007/09/04 15:30 of Lazy Susan

Worked on the game all day today (eek! don't tell my supervisor!) and got heaps done.

Spent quite a while toying with different rules, including some lengthy debates with random people in the computer lab, and a bunch of first year game design students (whose helpful comments ranged from "It should have bunnies!" to "Make it pink!").

I've settled on a very simple blocking-style game. The "twist" factor makes it hard to plan a strategy, but after a few plays through it becomes more obvious. It's not the most original or challenging game in the world, but I'll stick with it modulo minor variations because it's working.

The minimax was a nightmare to write -- sure, it's a simple algorithm to understand, and it's only 10 or so lines of code -- but it's nigh impossible to debug. There's all kinds of tricksy corner cases they don't tell you about in AI class :-)

The evaluation function is still simplistic (it only looks at the winning condition, so it sucks at the beginning/middle of the game). I'll tackle this later.

The moves, both by player and AI are all animated now so it's clearer what's going on. You can set up the game to play with any combination of humans and AI bots.