The solitaire version of the dice game Yahtzee™ has been ``solved'' by several different researchers in the past few years. Most recently this was achieved by starting with a simpler game called Yacht. The code described in this talk solves Yacht in a couple of seconds on a modern computer, leading to a reasonable expectation that the full two-player version of Yacht can be solved in a reasonable amount of time using parallelism, although two-player Yahtzee is still at the limit of current computational capabilities. This talk explains the concepts behind perfect solutions to Yacht-like games, describes the methods and heuristics used to achieve current performance, and estimates the computational costs of various extensions to the current work.
Slides are available in PDF or compressed PostScript.