Not much new game development over the past few days. Had to meet the families for the obligatory rabbit-worship ceremonies, getting myself a nasty sinus infection in the process.

I did, however, get the beginnings of the AI for the Um El Bagara game written on friday. I've got some nice little Minimax functions that I use for many of the games, which work especially well with Mancala-type games because there are usually only 6 or so moves available on a given turn. With so few available moves, you can make the tree nice and deep, clobbering your opponent easily without taking a lot of time.

Factoid: that's why games like GO have notoriously bad AI. At the start of the game, there are 400 moves available, making the game entirely unsuitable for use with Minimax implementations. To look 2 full moves ahead would require 25 billion calls to the static evaluator. Games of GO are also quite long, often requiring the user to plan a dozen moves ahead. Ugh.