Gamesman - The "Shall We Play a Game?" Project
     
 
   
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Assignment > Background

Background

Gamesman is a software library for solving and playing two-person, complete-information (no change or hidden information) board games started by Dan Garcia in the summer of 1988 (when he was an undergraduate just like you!). This software works with game modules which describe the rules and winning / losing conditions of a particular game. The Gamesman system then solves the game (i.e., plays every game against itself and makes a table of the value at each position), and provides an interactive platform to play and analyze it. With this table at hand, Gamesman plays perfectly, and by doing so provides the ideal opponent for a player wishing to improve their skill.

The system is quite nice in that there is relatively little work to implement a game. You just fill in a few required functions and then sit back while Gamesman does all the work solving it and controlling the play. By now, you've already seen Gamesman in action.

The following slides briefly introduce the game theories that Gamesman is based on.

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