• Contact: tech-userlevel

Right now /usr/games/gomoku is not very smart. This has two consequences: first, it's not that hard to beat it if one tries; and second, if you put it in a spot, it takes annoyingly long to play and chews up tons of RAM. On older hardware or a RAM-limited virtual machine, it'll run out of memory and bail.

A few years ago when I (dholland) looked into this, there was a small but apparently nonempty community of AI researchers working on gomoku brains. There was also some kind of interface standard for gomoku brains such that they could be conveniently run against one another.

This project is to:

• track down the latest version of that standard and add external brain support to our gomoku(6);
• package a good gomoku brain in pkgsrc if there's a suitable open-source one;
• based on available research, improve the brain built into our gomoku (doesn't have to be competitive, just not terrible);
• also (if applicable) improve the framework the built-in brain code uses so it can back out if it runs out of memory.

Some of these issues were originally raised in http://gnats.netbsd.org/3126.

Note to passersby: "gomoku" is not the same game as "go".