Currently there is a lot of fuss about Wordfeud, a turn based Scrabble(tm) like game, on the tablets and smartphones. Turn based games are already as old as there is connection over the mail between people. There are played hundreds, thousands of chess games by people sending each other a postcard with the next move. This is called "correspondence chess". When internet became more and more popular, people started to play through email. I, for example, started to play with the IECG. Which is nowadays defunct, because server based playing took over the world.

Since last week I have put my Connect6 program MakeIt6 active on the LittleGolem game server. The first tournament was not much of a success, but that is all in the game as we have at the moment only implemented a rough random search for one ply deep. Next thing to do is fix a bug that does not block a four stone threat.

Well, I'm not sure if I should write something about it. MakeIt6 played in the Computer Olympiad 2010 in Kanazawa, Japan. It scored 0 out of 10 games. Not a result its programmer and operator (me!) wanted. But sure there is much to improve.

Luckily, the game inventor Professor I-Chen Wu was helpful and understanding. I got an invitation for playing in Taiwan in November and an article that will be published in IEEE Explorer this month. Further at the conference there was also a paper and I got a Taiwanese thesis, with my name in it! So next year I hope to have a much better program.

The next item to implement for Kanazawa is a small opening book. Last year I played with MeinStein and got outplayed from the beginning because of an opening book by one of the Chinese programs. So I decided to implement a simple book.

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  1. MakeIt6 knows Alpha-Beta
  2. MakeIt6 - A Connect6 game
  3. Computer Olympiade en Conferentie Japan 2010
  4. Arimaa
  5. Computer Olympiade & Conferentie 2009 Pamplona
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