Beej's Bit Bucket

Some links for y’all:

• Chad’s love of code reviews—and I agree. It can be tough to expose your code to better eyes, but everyone is improved because of it.
• Review Board—along those lines, here is an open source code review tool that was linked to in the comments for the code-review post.
• Building Flash Multiplayer Games—a somewhat extended tutorial that I haven’t actually gone through, but looks decent.
• What Really Happens When You Navigate To A URL. Semi-technical, and informative if you don’t already know it.
• Factorial Lookup. Ever wonder what 182,731! is? (You might have to give it several seconds to download before it renders.) Sometimes the most practical way to solve difficult (or impossible) problems is to just try to look up the answers in a massive precalculated table. Also see Reverse MD5 Hash Lookup.
• Arimaa—a modern game played on a chess board with chess pieces, specifically designed to make it difficult to write effective AI to play it.
• Making Computer Science More Enticing. A good inspirational 2-minute vid at the top, and information about how Stanford University’s revamping of their CS program led to higher enrollment.
• Understanding Weak References, a Java-oriented article, but generally applicable.

Some moves are better than others. (This image represents my maximum drawing ability; I've titled it "The Unfeeling Mustache Of Justice".)

It’s time for me to once again blog about something I barely know anything about: using minimax for game AI! Game on!

Let’s say you have a game, like tic-tac-toe, where each player makes alternating moves.  When you make your move, you’re thinking, “Where is my opponent going to move after this?  And what move will I make then?”  And your opponent is thinking the same thing.

Each step of the way, you assume your opponent is going to do what’s best for them and worst for you.  (Maybe they’ll make a mistake, and you’ll get an advantage, but don’t count on it.) And every step of that look-ahead that you both are doing, you both are thinking, “What move should I make that minimizes my loss and maximizes my gain?”

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