HsTZAAR ------- HsTZAAR is a computer program to play TZAAR, a 2-player abstract strategy game designed by Kris Burm and the last game in the GIPF project. HsTZAAR is written in Haskell and allows for local play against a computer AI; it also provides a good interface for programmers to implement diferent AI strategies. This program was based on the htzaar implementation by Tom Hawkins. In 2010, I started experimenting with classical AI techniques for TZAAR and implemented them on-top of htzaar; since the later package is longer updated, I decided to start HsTZAAR. The main improvements so far are: * a better GUI using gtk2hs for widgets and cairo for high-quality 2D board rendering. * a better AI using minimax and alpha-beta prunning; it now plays at a challenging level (at least for a beginner like myself). Requirements ------------ HsTZAAR requires a resonably recent GHC compiler (version 6.10.x or newer) plus the gtk2hs, cairo and glade libraries. It is developed in Ubuntu GNU/Linux system, and should compile and run fine on other Linuxes. I also verified that it compiles under Mac OS X (snow leopard) and should probabily do under Windows as well (but this was not tested). Compilation ----------- Using the Haskell Cabal tool (fetches the package and any dependencies, builds and installs): $ cabal install hstzaar Alternatively, you can do the build manually from the source tarball: $ tar xvzf hstzaar-x.y.tar.gz $ cd hstzaar-x.y $ runhaskell Setup.hs configure $ runhaskell Setup.hs build $ runhaskell Setup.hs install AI strategies -------------- HsTZAAR implements a few AI strategies. lame: selects a random valid move greedy: selects the local best move by the static evaluation function plyN: simple minimaxing to N-ply dynN: greedy strategy for early game, then minimaxing N-ply for later game All of the above will select a winning move or a move to prevent the adversary from winning (if such moves are avaliable). Note that higher ply values can increase memory consumption dramatically and do *not* necessarily play better! The default greedy strategy plays well enough to challenge a beginner such as myself and run under 150Mb resident space. Usage ----- Executing the binary starts the GUI interface for playing against an AI; some extra options are controlled by command line arguments: hstzaar [OPTION..] [AI AI] where OPTIONS are -s SEED --seed=SEED random number seed -n N --matches=N number of matches (for AI tournaments) -T --tests run QuickCheck tests Examples: 1) Run a tournament between the greedy and ply2 strategies: 10 matches (5 random boards, each strategy plays first white then black, fixing the random seed for repeatebility): $ hstzaar -s0 -n10 greedy ply2 2) Run QuickCheck correctness tests (see source code for details on these): $ hstzaar --tests Pedro Vasconcelos, 2010 pbv@dcc.fc.up.pt