t_games, Take Two

[ichabod801]

How did you create an AI player?

I created lots of AI players. There's a base Player class, and there is a whole hierarchy of sub-classes to it. One is the Human class which is used for the user. Another sub-class of Player is the Bot class. All of the AI players are sub-classes of the Bot class, and there are usually more than one per game. Most of the bots are heuristic, just using per-programmed rules to determine their behavior. The Connect Four bots do a full tree search, with alpha-beta pruning (there is a parent class AlphaBetaBot, so other bots can make use of the algorithm). They're kind of slow, mainly due to the board copy method. I want to look into speeding that up. The bot for Backgammon was done using genetic engineering, although I think it needs a bit more engineering and maybe another genome, but I didn't have time for that.

Since Bot and Human are both sub-classes of the same class, and use the same methods, you don't need a human. Each game has a tournament method for running contests between different bot programs. On the flip side, there is a Cyborg class, with some features of both the Bot and Humanoid class. The Cyborg can be used to play both sides of a game while you are programming it, to make sure the game works before you write AI players for it.