Reversi (Othello)

I had developed the game of Reversi (Othello) during my BTech from 1999 till 2002. The earlier versions of the game was in DOS where user was supposed to enter row/column to make a move. I changed it to cursor based implementation and then migrated the whole code to Windows. I also added Windows Help which included history, rules and information about the algorithms I had used in deciding the best move for the computer. There were three different algorithms used:

1. The move which captures the highest number of opponent's balls - this was very preliminary
2. Each cell was given a priority with corner cells given higher priority than the middle ones and the next move was decided based on this priority.
3. A minimax search tree based approach where I was creating a tree of moves by both the players and was trying to get the best move that results in a win ultimately.

During my BTech Thesis in final year, I extended the game such that the games played would be stored in a knowledge base and in deciding the next move, the computer will refer the knowledge base to see if the move has resulted in losing the game in the past. This reduced the points for a particular move.

Recently I thought of learning programming in Android and downloaded the Android SDK. What is the best way to learn other than to implement Reversi on Android? But I am late. I found there are lots of Reversi games available here. The best I got more information is from Aart Bik. Aart is a Software Engineer at Google with a nice blog and a website. He has developed chess as well as checkers too.

His website gives details about perft, a method to verify the correctness of the move generation engine and different board representations. It also talks about protocols UCI, XBoard and Winboard that completely separates game engine from the user interface. During my own development of Reversi, I had never thought about doing all this standardization. Lucky me to know it today!