We are going to, in the probably the second week of December, we're going to

make a KALA championship where you form groups, if you want, and build a KALA AI.

Anybody know the game KALA? It's one of the oldest games on the planet. You play

it by having little pebbles or acorns or whatever you have. You make a couple of

little pits into the sand or into the earth or something like this in the form

that's basically like this and you take your acorns and basically evenly

distribute them on the inner pits. These are your private pits, right?

Both players get one and then the game mechanics is very simple. You take all

the acorns out of a pit of your choice and distribute them onto, in

this case there's two, onto the next two. If the opposing pit is empty, you

can take these and you can take your own pit. What was it that way? Well, maybe

if your last acorn comes into an

empty pit then you can take the opponent's acorns. So if this one is

empty, I empty out this one, put one here, put one there, take those, put them into

my own pit. And if I do that, I can basically do it again until I don't get

to take any acorns home and then the opponent can do the same. Very simple

game, surprisingly interesting. And if that is not interesting enough, you just

make it bigger. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to have a

championship where any number of groups can enter, build one, not in Prolog but

in Java or Scala. We're relenting on this, taking a real

programming language. And we basically supply with a game simulator

which your system can actually say, oh I want to empty out pit three and

distribute and so on. And in the end we'll have a big tournament in this

week, the second week of December. And we'll just have a ranking of teams and

so this will be one homework and the first ten groups get bonus points.

The first, the winner of it all gets a hundred bonus points and the second one

ninety and so on. And everybody who submits a color that actually

plays color gets four points but no bonus points unless they're in the

top ten. This is work but you'll have, it's a lot of fun and it's also, you

understand search very well after that typically. Okay and of course we're

going to also try out your systems against last year's systems, if they still

run who knows. So you can see how you're doing. Okay so actually I think Cala,

there are winning strategies to Cala up to six which you could download but of

course we're going to play it with seven and all. But it's good to actually train

if you need to train on smaller Calas. Okay upshot of all that I've been saying,

if you want to win here you better understand get an intuitive feeling for

the search spaces involved. So this is a good, this is just a nice thing. Any

questions? Yes.

Anything that talks to our Java classes is allowed so there are Java

Python bridges and if you can get that to work be my guest. I don't believe that

this is a good idea but who knows what you can cook up.

Python is Turing complete, meaning you can do anything in Python that you can

do in Java. The answer is yes you can do it in Python. I do not care what your

program does. Okay. It should be written by you though and it should play Cala.

Anything else is your private enjoyment. And it will be group work, okay, other

than the other homeworks. Any more questions?

How many persons are form one group? I believe it is three but don't quote me on

this. Dennis will organize the whole thing. All right, thank you. If you need

to know, post a question on the forum.