[Kde-games-devel] Competitive and leisurely play

[Inge Wallin]

As you might have noticed, I have started to implement the plan that I
outlined a few weeks ago for Kreversi.

During this time I have begun to find a few things in the code that I
would like to change.  One of those things is the way that kreversi
implements weak play.

"Implementing weak play" may sound strange, but the idea is that the
engine is too strong for beginners (see bug 79867,
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79867).  So to make it more fun for
beginners to play against kreversi, there is currently a scheme that makes
kreversi "miss" good moves in a random way.  The stronger the setting, the
less likely kreversi is to miss a good move.

The problem is that currently there is not any way to say that I want the
engine to play optimally.  Sometimes it makes really stupid mistakes even
at strong settings, and this is irritating.

So I have an idea to fix this that I would like some feedback upon.

The idea is that we should augment the game settings with a radion button
with two different settings.  The first setting would be "casual play",
where the computer can miss good moves in the same way as today.  The
other would be "competitive play" when the computer would play as good as
it can.  This setting would be in addition to the current strength
setting, which basically determines the search depth for the alpha-beta
search.

I also think that only games played competitively should go into the
highscore table.

Comments?

	-Inge


Inge Wallin               | Thus spake the master programmer:               |
                          |      "After three days without programming,     |
inge at lysator.liu.se       |       life becomes meaningless."                |
                          | Geoffrey James: The Tao of Programming.         |