Fall 2000 CS 441/541 Lines Of Action Tournament

The tournament was run Wednesday evening December 6 2000. Of the 13 submitted projects, 6 qualified for the tournament by dint of completing games against LOA-Q without crashing or violating the rules. A couple of potentially strong players appear to have been excluded from the tournament because of last-minute interface troubles. Such is life.

The qualifying programs were

  1. aloa (Hiserote, C++)
  2. Diplomat+ (Cole, Java)
  3. ic1 (Brenner, C++)
  4. anon (Martin, C)
  5. Foob (Crop, Java)
  6. cb (Vasudevan, C)
Because of the small field, a complete round-robin was held: each program played each other program as both black and white. As announced earlier, each program was given 300 seconds (5 minutes) to complete its moves. No program came anywhere close to time trouble during the tournament.

The results were as follows. In this table, each entry shows the outcome of a black-white matchup between two programs, with `-' indicating a drawn game.

Tournament Results
1-2: 12-1: 2
1-3: 13-1: 1
1-4: 14-1: 1
1-5: 15-1: 1
1-6: 16-1: 1
2-3: 23-2: 2
2-4: 24-2: 2
2-5: 25-2: 2
2-6: 26-2: 2
3-4: -4-3: -
3-5: 35-3: 3
3-6: 36-3: -
4-5: 45-4: -
4-6: -6-4: 4
5-6: 56-5: 5

Upon careful inspection, there are clearly 3 groups of programs: 1 and 2, 3-5, and 6. After some consideration and further evaluation, I was led to declare the following tournament ranking

  1. Tie: aloa, Diplomat+
  2. Tie: ic1, anon
  3. Foob
  4. cb
Further experiments between aloa and Diplomat+ at much longer time limits continued to be inconclusive, and these programs both play a fairly strong game of LOA; much stronger than any other program in the tournament.

Congratulations to Jay and Brian, and to all who participated! We'll hold the awards ceremony early next quarter.