Hi Lyman,

thank you very much for your suggestions.

Am Montag, den 03.09.2007, 17:39 -0700 schrieb Lyman Hurd:
> I played with the tournament rules. After trying
> several "standard" rules games I came to the
> conclusion that they are fundamentally less
> interesting because one can never be put into a
> position where you have to win by a method other than
> claiming white marbles. With 5 total white marbles
> someone can always claim 3. In the tournament
> version, the 6 available white marbles can be split
> 3-3 (as they often are in advanced play) and one has
> to alter ones strategy.
>
I just had the intention to implement the rules from the board game. My
instructions explained it like that and just the additional rings are
variants I found on the internet. I am not sure whether the names
"standard" and "tournament" are a good choice since the name
"tournament" is many times overloaded.
What is your concrete suggestion?

> The Zertz AI violates the fundamental principle of
> opening strategy on the small board. There is a
> forced win for the second player if the first player:
>
> 1) Plays the first marble on the edge of the board, or
>
> 2) removes a non-corner ruing in the first move.
>
> Lesson 1 was brought home to me in my first serious
> game on Richard's PBEM server! Rule 2 was only
> pointed out to me somewhat later and I was able to
> verify.
>
> At a minimum I would suggest changing the AI so that
> it never fell into one of these two traps (the
> equivalent of a Fool's Mate in chess). There is a way
> in these situations for the second player to force the
> capture of two white marbles while giving up 1 white,
> 2 grey and 3 black and leaving an empty board. Then
> no matter where the first player plays on the now
> empty board, the second player can gain an additional
> two whites.
>
> An interesting next step would be to make sure that
> the AI knows how to take advantage of either of these
> two mistakes! The first is easier to deal with. It
> essentially entails isolating the marble into a corner
> and I believe in no case involves allowing the first
> player an unforced move. Some of the cases for rule 2
> lead to situations where you have to allow an unforced
> choice of captures even though both branches lead to
> the desired result.
>
I guess the current AI is no match for a player in that league. My
current AI just does breadth first search with slightly deeper sequences
in case of knock out moves. In order to create a competitive AI for
Zertz you have to make plans like "can I isolate an interesting amount
of marbles" or "can I knock out many marbles at once". Plan making
humans work in move depths which are totally out of reach of breadth
first searches. The combination of set-moves with ring-remove-moves
creates a huge space of possibilities.

It would be interesting to create a competitive strategy but I am
currently not about to add many challenging features. If you like to
also help with implementations I surely could help you to get a grip on
the code or to add an easier API for AI development.

In case you like Holtz, what would be your major use case?
I started to use it as network game with friends but later I used it
more as analysis tool for PBM and Little Golem. For the analysis case I
guess better AIs would not be the point but maybe a variant-tree of
played moves like in ZF1. Would you as expert player seek for this
feature or is ZF1 just fine?

kind regards,

Martin