@hackage babylon0.3

Babylon

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

The rules of the game are very simple:

• there are 12 stone tablets in 4 colors (3 of each color)
• initially the stones are randomly placed on the table, forming twelve 1-stone piles
• on his/her turn, a player moves one pile ontop of another provided that they have the same height or the same top color (or both)
• the first player who cannot perform a move loses the game.

The game play very fast, typically under 5 mins; since there are only 12 piles at the start, and each turn decrements one pile, the game must finish in at most 11 moves.

Note that there is a winning strategy for the second player, but it does not appear to be a simple heuristic for it (?). The computer will play the winning strategy at the hardest level, so it will always win as a second player at this level.

This was basically programmed in a single day as an experiment using this wxWidgets (though I was experienced with Haskell). I thought it would be a nice addition to show a simple but real Haskell program.

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