Barney Pell's Weblog

• A variant of chinese checkers in which up to 6 players could play at a time.
• A game called "blocks and corridors" in which the two players make simultaneous moves on identical 3x5 grids. Each player has a single piece that start at the top right of their grid and win by being the first player to get his piece to the bottom of the grid. On each turn, a player either moves his piece or sets up a block between two rows on the opponent's board. The block covers the left or right two squares (meaning the blocked player has to move to the square on the unblocked column before moving down to the next row).
• A standard version of Othello.

The teams had worked really hard on their players and had implemented a variety of interesting visualizations and strategies, including:

• Multi-player minimax searches.
• Searching breadth and depth first in parallel.
• Making a series of (mostly) random probes to the end of the game and then taking the expected outcome for each player to decide on the statisticaly best move.
• Compiling the game descriptions into C and and then assembly language for extremely fast calculation.
• Analyzing the rules for invariants and strongly connected components (including a graphic display).
• A graphic display that shows search tree considered by the program, with gradient colored nodes indicating the program's evaluation of each position. (This was beautiful!).

Unfortunately, demo effects set in to the detriment of each of the teams. Hence, most of the programs, including ones that had performed flawlessly in practice rounds just the day before, made illegal moves, or failed to move in time. The students were understandably disappointed. Nevertheless, Mike Genesereth and I were both impressed with what they accomplished. I hope the teams continue to debug their programs so we can see what happens when the programs play as they were intended to do.

There will be a general game playing competition at the upcoming AAAI national conference in July. Since Stanford is the organizer, these students won't be able to compete for the prize, but I expect their programs will make strong showings in the open competition.