ABSTRACT
Two-player board games The simplest game is noughts and crosses. Even this game presents several challenges but with only a 3× 3 playing grid it can be thought of as a game that could be analysed to a finish. Connect 4 is a variation on noughts and crosses limiting the player’s possible moves to filled columns only, and the game is made more difficult since a line of four is required. The classic two-player board game is chess, but programming a full chess implementation is beyond a one-chapter tutorial. The game of Go is such an easy game to learn and such a difficult one to master. The game we are going to concentrate on in this chapter is a simple game to learn and yet again quite tricky to play well, but it does have some very useful ground rules that makes it easier to teach a computer to play at least reasonably well.
