Google AI Competition

Hmmm, how good are AI comps? I am letting my inner geek take over for the next few days as I put the evil stumac bot in Google's AI comp.

I am currently 30th (out of 415 entrants) with a few things still to do to really make my bot competitive.

To begin with I implemented a basic strategy and that had me at 90th out of 400. When I say basic, I mean really basic (code to come after the competition).

I then added a minimax look ahead, this currently looks ahead 9 moves, a bug was causing me to lose games.

So now I will:

• alpha beta prune my minimax.
• upgrade my evaluation function.
• add a 'in same area' check and revert to flooding if in separate areas.
• Add a timing check (if possible) to give a good answer before timing out.

Should be fun!

Hopefully this should be able to get us into the top 10.