@hackage lostcities0.1

Lost Cities

This is an implementation of a short two-player card game in Haskell using the wxWidgets GUI toolkit. This program allows you to play against a computer AI using a minimax algorithm with alpha-beta prunning (based on Bird and Wadler's presentation in the "Introduction to Functional Programming").

The game is played with a deck of cards numbered from 2 to 10 in 5 colors plus 3 "investment" cards for each color (marked with a multiplication sign). The game progressed by playing cards in columns of same colors of increasing value ("expeditions"); starting a new expedition costs -20 points and the played cards are summed; the investment cards multiply the result (positive or negative).

Crucially, the computer AI does not "cheat": unknown information (i.e., the opponents hand and draw deck) is hidden by considering possible scenarios that are compatible with the known information. It seems to play only moderately well, but still better than some online AI opponents I tried.

For more details check the Boardgamegeek page: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/50.

If you have any comments please drop me a line,

Pedro Vasconcelos pbv@dcc.fc.up.pt Department of Computer Science Faculty of Science, University of Porto, Portugal