Abstract
One of the oldest games worldwide – the Mancala game – is focused on in this preliminary study. Namely, its the most popular version – the Kalah game – is considered. This contribution is aimed at the analysis of Kalah rules first. Further, based on these rules, some novel deterministic and suboptimal strategies are proposed. It is proved that the order of playing has a decisive impact on winning. The proposed strategies have been implemented via a simple C++/Qt application. By experiments, a human player, when playing as the second one, cannot defend the designed strategies in general. However, the same applies in reverse – when a human player begins, he/she can nearly always win. To sum up, the proposed software-based strategies are comparable to human opponents.
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We do have to express our gratitude to Dr. Petr Dostálek for his patience during preparing this contribution.
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Pekař, L., Andrla, J., Dolinay, J. (2020). Design and Software Implementation of Heuristic and Suboptimal Strategies for the Mancala/Kalah Game. In: Silhavy, R. (eds) Intelligent Algorithms in Software Engineering. CSOC 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1224. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51965-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51965-0_4
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