[Kde-games-devel] New AI - direction to making some games more "serious"?

[Martin Heni]

> The games in question would be at least KReversi and KFourInLine (what

I am a bit surprised about trhe choice of "kfourinline". It already uses a 
standard AI engine (a-b tree search). It even has the experiemental feature 
of "learning" from mistakes build in. So actually I am not so keen to 
completely replace it. However, what could be done would be the following:

1. Somewhere there is a bug which leads to weak moves occasionally. If you 
would find this I would be grateful. However, I suppose you didnt meant to 
debug the current engine ;-)

2. The AI search uses few or now optimizations to reduce the search time. One 
could add some of these for performance gains. However, on all normal levels 
on nowadays computers I think it is fast enough to not cause a problem. 
However, cutting the search tree might be a thing to do. This could be added 
to the current engine realtively easily.

3. Connect 4 is a "solved" game. That is a perfect AI engine exists. The Gnome 
Connect 4 uses this one. However, I personally dont really want an AI which 
slaughters me everytime. It might be an addition for expertes though. 
I suppose when Inge suggested an AI engine for KFourInLine he ment 
implementing this "perfect engine", as this is the only thing which really 
makes sense if you want to improve. Otherwise you just replace one not 
perfect engine with another not perfect engine. Consequently, what we could 
do would be to add this perfect engine as an "expert" or "unbeatable" level 
on top of the old engine. If someone wants to play perfect he could do so - 
and furthermore the Gnome Connect 4 wouldn't beat us anymore ;-))

Generally, the AI integration on kfourinline is quite modular so replacing or 
adding another engine should be quite trivial.