Thomas Ross Hallock

North: 12 prongs
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South: 11 prongs

On the heels of last week’s post of my implementation of Tonobeb for the web, I bring you another board game blast from my past: back in 2001, I wrote a simple minimax AI in Haskell for a board game called Octi for Kids, a simplified version of Don Green‘s OCTI board game.

I finally had some time this morning to recompile the Haskell code into a binary that runs on my webhost, so now you can play against it while it thinks:

• three moves in advance
• four moves in advance
• five moves in advance

Inspection of the url in the links above will reveal how to arbitrarily increase the look-ahead level.

The code is available here on github.

Back in 1983, my uncle Bruce came up with a fun board game played with dice. My dad made a nice wooden board for it and Bruce got a write-up of the the game published in Gameplay Magazine. Fast forward to 2006 and I made a playable web version of the game; it was the first web application that I finished, and even now, I’m a bit impressed in using it. This pre-dates jQuery, so please savor the library-free hand-coded javascript ajaxy goodness. Without further ado, I present Web Tonobeb:

If someone else loads this page at the same time as you, you will be matched with them automatically. Alternatively, you can challenge a friend by e-mail.

I just open sourced Web Tonobeb on github; I probably won’t have much time to turn it into something that Yahoo games would want to acquire, but you might! Clone away!