rules of pente
Tested on:
Mac OS 9 w/ Apple Applet Runner & IE 5
Windows ME w/ appletviewer & IE 5.5
An applet viewer is recommended. Browsers tend to "hang", or give the appearance of having ceased functioning, with too great a frequency to not give you this warning. Patience is usually rewarded with continued game-play, however.
NOTES:Started some years ago as an 'introductory' exercise in java application development using JDK 1.1.8 on Mac OS 9, but soon morphed into an app with the goal of being able to 'teach' itself to play the game of Pente better than the programmer's hand-coded algorithms could provide. It has subsequently reached a certain level of game-play respectability by repeatedly playing itself and 'remembering' winning configurations. The application was converted to an applet and posted here fairly recently ( fall 2002 ).
The applet has no look-ahead abilities as such. It makes move decisions based on the current board configuration and a "genome" of relevant values that are generated ( randomly, but within learned parameters ) each time it is loaded. The end result is that it is not very good, though sometimes surprises, and shows some variability in how it plays from game to game.
Development is currently paused while a search for a servlet-supporting host continues. This would allow it to become a truly robust "thin-client" internet app, and perhaps, allow it to learn from its human opponents with every game
