getMove

In order for a bot to be usable in the Arimaa community, it must be able to run in a certain fashion. Using some Perl scripts provided on the Arimaa website, our bot will be able to play in the Arimaa online game room. The bot connection scripts are located here:

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/download/bot/

The files of interest are the ‘bot’ connection script and the bot.cfg, the bot configuration file. When the bot script is run, it starts a new game in the Arimaa game room. Then when someone, or another bot joins, the Arimaa game room sends the state of the board back to the connection bot script which then sends the state of the board to our Bot called getMove (it is named this since that is the standard convention, this may be changed later on). The board state contains the last move count (1, 2, 3…), the last color move (black or white), and the actual board itself with the current position of the pieces. Then using some of our algorithms, we will determine the best set of moves to make and output the move(s). The bot connection receives the move and sends it to the game room.

As of right now, getMove is very simplistic. If the move count is only 1, then it runs a random function to pick starting positions from a list of known good positions. If the move count is greater than 1, then it will run a combination of our Zobrist hashing and Minimax algorithms (the implementation for these are separate from the getMove program right now).