[Adonthell-general] The Isola Game

[Alexandre Courbot]

Hi guys!

As you know, since a few weeks I'm a bit off the project, and that until
June 15th, because of my university projects and exams preparation. But
fortunately I have been able to mix up a bit university projects and
Adonthell!

As discussed before, we want to include little board games into
Adonthell. My AI project this year precisely consisted of implementing a
board game (Isola) and write a player using an alpha-beta algorithm. So
I and my projects partner have written a C++, completely templatized
alpha-beta which can be plugged any game and heuristic, and so is
perfectly suitable for Adonthell!

We have even developped our GUI using the Adonthell sources. So the
algorithm is nearly perfectly integrated into Adonthell. I have still a
few things to adapt, but it looks like we can have board games in 0.4.

For those who are interested:

http://www.lifl.fr/~courbot

isola-1.0 is the source code, that you can easily compile, while
isola-contest is a statically linked binary distribution, if you only
want to play.

The 'isola' binary MUST be run in the top distribution directory,
otherwise it won't find the data files. Options are couples of 'human'
or 'ai' to decide how each player is controlled.

The principle is simple: You and your opponent have a gem on the board.
On each turn, you have to move on another adjacent square (by clicking
on it), and destroy any square of the board (by clicking on it, too).
The goal is to make your opponent unable to move.

The AI is actually not very difficult to beat, because (1) our heuristic
sucks a little bit, and (2) the game has a very high branching factor
(many many possibilities each time). But all the basic code is there to
make our own board games, plugging if needed a Python heuristic.

Have fun!
Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org