ICS 180, Winter 1997:
Strategy and board game programming

Tentative Schedule

5 Jan: Lecture: history of computer games
7 Jan: Project: form project teams
 
12 Jan: Lecture: representation of game positions
14 Jan: Project: proposals due
Lecture: position evaluation
 
19 Jan: No lecture
21 Jan: Project: proposals reviewed and returned
Lecture: game tree evaluation
 
26 Jan: Lecture: alpha-beta pruning
28 Jan: Lecture: hashing and move ordering
 
2 Feb: Lecture: forcing progress in winning positions; variants of alpha-beta search
4 Feb: Project: should have user interface, board representation, and move generation working
Lecture: horizon effect; quiescence and selective extensions; null move pruning
 
9 Feb: Lecture: opening books and endgame databases; book learning
11 Feb: Lecture: construction of endgame databases
 
16 Feb: Lecture: playout analysis and games of chance
18 Feb: Lecture: neural nets, genetic algorithms, and other methods for automatically learning evaluation functions
 
11 Mar: Project: turn in final project report (by 5:00, in my mailbox in CS 448)
 
16 Mar: Project: Demonstrations in CS 183, 10:30 - 12:30

David Eppstein, Dept. Information & Computer Science, UC Irvine, .