Version 1 of Dots and Boxes

Updated 2002-10-01 15:04:38

KBK 1 October 2002

Over the last year or two, a number of Tcl'ers have become interested in the game of Dots and Boxes - a pencil-and-paper strategy game that's simple enough for a six-year-old to learn and deep enough to challenge an adult. No doubt, one catalyst was the appearance of Elwyn Berlekamp's book, The Dots and Boxes Game: sophisticated child's play [L1 ], and the review of the book that appeared in Ian Stewart's column in the January, 2001 issue of Scientific American. [284:1, pp. 102-103]

Jonathan Cook got the ball rolling with his 'dotsgame' Tclet. It was written as a framework for a programming contest, so allowed contestants to have various robot players, and allowed human-human, robot-robot, and human-robot play. It's still available at http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jcook/dotsgame.tar.gz .

The sample robot player that jonathan developed was extremely weak, but Donal Fellows got interested in improving it, and brought out a much stronger robot: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/tcl/bitsandpieces/thinker Kevin Kenny saw this robot as a challenge, and worked with Donal to come up with even stronger players.

http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/games/eDots.zip


I am told that Dots and Boxes is known as Pigs and Sties in the North of England, and as Cheese Boxes in Germany.