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Other Games Considered Unprogrammable
   

If you think programming Go is too difficult (with all that ko, seki, counting rules, life and death) to start one's own program, here are some alternatives:

Of course a lot of games exist, for which no good computer opponent exists. Often these are just too unknown. Often however there's a strategic component in the game that the human player can handle well, but the computer can not.


Similar to Go in the aspects:

  • that the branching factor is high
  • once set, a stone stays on the board & doesn't move

Especially interesting are the following two:

Hex

  • (solved up to 7x7, already very strong programs exist, however less strong than humans on boards larger than 9x9)
  • kde-opponent "six-0.5.0.tar.gz" for example
  • See computer-olympiad-pages for a list of papers on hex
  • only mentioned here because of the following one:

Havannah: ("unprogrammable"?!, $1000 for computer that beats human)

havannah is very similar to hex:

Is a strong opponent possible with hex methods? -- ab

Dots and Boxes

ilanpi: I find this game similar to Go in many ways. I believe that it might be more difficult than Go, because there is a parity condition where I could give it inherent instability. It has been completely analyzed by computer up to the 5x5 dots case (16 boxes). The 6x6 case (25 boxes) is unsolved as of 2002. I have played these sizes and have found the play quite similar to 7x7 Go, and therefore similarly much simpler than 9x9 Go. Unfortunately, it seems hard to get a good game on anything larger than a 5x5 dots board, so I don't think much concrete is known about Dots strategy for larger sizes (as compared to go, for example). I have written a web site about Dots: [ext] http://cf.geocities.com/ilanpi/dots.html


Similar to chess

While the upper two were for the Go players, the following one is for the chess players

Arimaa

Shogi

Anonymous opinion: I've heard this is hard for the computers too.


Other

ktron

ktron: Seems very difficult to me too. Although this is an "action"-game, if you remove the time pressure from the human player you can also look at it as a strategy game, played on a graph, with branching factor 3 and possibly large depth.


Zertz

Gerhard: The Zertz game ([ext] http://www.gipf.com) is also difficult for computers since you must look a large number of moves (ususally > 10) ahead. The different winning possibilities and strategy changes during the game can make this a computational difficult problem. I know of only one Zertz-playing program that plays extremely poor.


See also Artificial Intelligence Programming



This is a copy of the living page "Other Games Considered Unprogrammable" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.