4 gewinnt

A very strong "Connect Four" program, written in collaboration with Meinhard Ullrich.

I worked with Meinhard while at university; our joint research project was to develop smart board game algorithms. Our diploma thesis, for example, discussed a distributed Nine Men's Morris (German: "Mühle") game program which we developed jointly.

"4 gewinnt" was a by-product of those activities. During a seminar on neural networks, all participants had to write a Connect-Four program based on NN technology. We contributed a conventional, brute-force version which was supposed to train the NN-based versions and to test how "smart" they really were. (Needless to say that our code won the competition with ease .-)

BTW: A few years after we wrote our own Connect Four program, advances in hardware and game theory made perfectly playing Connect Four possible.

• Download "4 gewinnt"
• Expert play in Connect-Four
• Some other Connect Four programs
• Wikipedia entries on Connect-Four and Nine Men's Morris

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