Gothello

PSU CS 441/541 Final Project
Due by 5:00PM Friday, December 7 2001.
Not accepted after this moment.

As you know, the Final Project for this course will be done individually or in two-person teams: if you are forming a team, please let me know ASAP. Each team will implement a Gothello player.

There is currently information about the project's role in the class and administration as well as about the software and systems with which you will need to interface.

All programs must play legal moves in all positions, and must work with the provided automatic referee (even if they will not participate in the tournament). All programs must use some AI technique, from the course or elsewhere, to play a better game than a random or simple heuristic player would. The recommended technique is game-tree search, but learning is also likely to work well for this game.

For graduate students, those enrolled in CS541, the requirements are a bit tougher. You must implement a reasonable state-of-the art version of your player. For game-tree search, this means alpha-beta pruning, iterative deepening, and a transposition table. For a learning algorithm, this means some reasonably modern implementation of a reasonably standard technique. If in doubt about what you need to do, contact me.

What everyone must turn in:

1. Name of the program, for the tournament. If you would prefer that your program not be entered in the tournament, indicate this here.
2. A few paragraphs describing the program. What general technique did you try? What enhancements did you implement? What heuristic ideas did you use? What's good and bad about the program? How well does it play?
3. A description of how to compile and run the program.
4. The program. Make sure it is reasonably readable (commented, formatted, etc.) as I am going to read it.