Nabamoku

Nabamoku is a gomoku player developed for the Gomocup tournament of computer programs. It participated on the international Gomocup 2007 tournament.

Properties

Because of a strong time restriction, caused by the final work on the master thesis, only a skeleton of the engine has been implemented. Nevertheless, Nabamoku ver. 0.01 ended roughly in the middle of the playing field of the Gomocup 2007 tournament.

The skeleton of the Nabamoku engine employs alpha-beta search with iterative deepening and transposition tables (aka hash tables). The algorithm would not be far as good as it is now without a sophisticated handling of different levels of threats in the game.

Current status

The skeleton of the engine has been succesfully implemented and crash-tested on the tournament. Even with an extremely simplistic evaluation function Nabamoku has beaten many of its opponents during the tournament.

Planned future

Because artificial learning is one of my domains of interest, I would really like to incorporate some evaluation function trained on the games from the previous tournaments. Nowadays, however, because of the time restriction, only an extremely simple hand-written move evaluation is involved.

Requirements

Nabamoku requires Java Runtime Environment, version 5.0 or newer. Because of the Gomocup requirements, Nabamoku is distributed as Microsoft Windows executable file.

Download

nabamoku.zip (28KB)