After watching The Dark Knight I became rather enthralled with the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma. There must be an algorithm that that maximizes one's own gain given a situation. For those that find this foreign: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma Very, very interesting stuff. Edit: The question is, what is, if any,...
Dear Stack Overflow community, I was recently in a discussion with a non-coder person on the possibilities of chess computers. I'm not well versed in theory, but think I know enough. I argued that there could not exist a deterministic Turing machine that always won or stalemated at chess. I think that, even if you search the entire s...
I'm looking for a good algorithm recommendation. I have Users and Achievements. Users create Achievements and then give them to other Users. Associated with each Achievement is the point value that the user specifies. A User's total points is the sum of all their achievements. Basically: Achievement : owner = Alias points = in...
I write programs to play board game variants sometimes. The basic strategy is standard alpha-beta pruning or similar searches, sometimes augmented by the usual approaches to endgames or openings. I've mostly played around with chess variants, so when it comes time to pick my evaluation function, I use a basic chess evaluation function....
This is not a programming question per se, although the ultimate goal is to devise an algorithm. I'm looking for references or at least the name of a type of game. It is pretty widespread on television game-shows. The game is as follows: You have a number of slots, each slot contains an item (from some finite set), which you don't kno...
This is going to be a long post and just for fun, so if you don't have much time better go help folks with more important questions instead :) There is a game called "Tower Bloxx" recently released on xbox. One part of the game is to place different colored towers on a field in a most optimal way in order to maximize number of most valu...
I haven't studied game theory, but it fascinates me. My intuition is that it isn't used by most "enterprise app" developers. However, it is clearly relevant to the large online sites (e.g. recommendation systems), and a huge influence on SO. Have you applied any principles of game theory in your daily projects? If so, which principles? ...
Support we have an n * m table, and two players play this game. They rule out cells in turn. A player can choose a cell (i, j) and rule out all the cells from (i,j) to (n, m), and who rules out the last cell loses the game. For example, on a 3*5 board, player 1 rules out cell (3,3) to (3,5), and player 2 rules out (2,5) to (3,5), curre...
In The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention, the authors mention that one creative way to boost productivity in software development is to implement "productivity games" where employees compete against each other in a way similar to gaining reputation and badges on Stack Overflow. One example they give is the Microsoft "Vista Internal B...
'Proximity' is a strategy game of territorial domination similar to Othello, Go and Risk. Two players, uses a 10x12 hex grid. Game invented by Brian Cable in 2007. Seems to be a worthy game for discussing a) optimal algorithm then b) how to build an AI. Strategies are going to be probabilistic or heuristic-based, due to the randomness f...
I am going to begin my final year at university this September so I need to do a project for my dissertation. I had a look at the list with the projects suggested by the uni last year and I don't find any of them THAT interesting. That, combined to my "love" for "theoretical" computer science as a whole got me into thinking that it would...
Given an arbitary peg solitaire board configuration, what is the most effecient way to compute any series of moves that results in the "end game" position. For example, the standard starting position is: ..***.. ..***.. ******* ***O*** ******* ..***.. ..***.. And the "end game" position is: ..OOO.. ..OOO.. OOOOOOO OOO*OOO OOOOOOO .....
It's for a game of checkers. See revision history for older versions of code. private static Move GetBestMove(Color color, Board board, int depth) { var bestMoves = new List<Move>(); var validMoves = board.GetValidMoves(color); int highestScore = int.MinValue; Board boardAfterMove; int tmp...
I'm trying to implement NegaMax for a game of checkers. I'm just testing it with a depth of 0 right now, meaning the current player just evaluates all his moves without regard to what the other player might do next. It works perfectly for about half the game (computes the scores correctly), and then part way through it starts spitting ou...
I'm trying to re-create this conquerclub (Risk-like) game: http://conquerclub.barrycarter.info/ONEOFF/7460216.html In other words, I want to know who owned each territory at each point in time, and how many troops they had on that territory. My primary source of information is the Game Log. Notes: % It's not in the Game Log, but ...
I have an interesting conceptual problem, and I'm wondering if anyone can help me quantify it. Basically, I'm playing a set of games... and for each game I know the probability that I will win, the probability that I will tie, and the probability that I will lose (each game will have different probabilities). At a high level, what I wa...