That means that The Game That's Name Cannot Be Spoken will be finished by others. I'll keep fixing bugs on the previous Game That's Name Cannot Be Spoken (the completed one), but I'm off the other project.
Come to think of it, I never did sign an NDA, so I suppose that I could tell you about the project.
Nyaah.
The things you find when you do a vanity search. Just found something put together by a student that performs an exhaustive solution on one of my games.
http://www.jasondoucette.com/ai.html
I find it interesting that he shows a solution that'll clobber my poor little AI player every time. The game was so good at clobbering ME every time I played it that I never bothered to make the AI any more devious (by randomly choosing between several "best" moves, for example). Since there are usually only about three available moves at any given turn, it's a simple matter to make the game-tree ridiculously deep, thus destroying any player who dares play the game.
Until now.
Also interesting that there are over 4 million possible positions in the game. I suppose this number, however, would decrease by over 99% if you took into account invalid positions, positions where the game is already over, rotations and reflections (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal). I imagine you'd then find a much smaller search-space and a much smaller database for playing an unbeatable opponent.
I read in an article somewhere that if you eliminate invalid positions and rotations and reflections (horizontal, vertical, and diagonal) from the exhaustive search-space of Tic Tac Toe, you end up with only 32 unique positions. That's how you can make a reasonable Tic Tac Toe player out of Tinkertoys.
