#Daddeln gegen Langeweile – das machen Menschen seit Jahrtausenden!
Das ist ein #Spielbrett aus dem 5. oder 6. Jahrhundert. Es befindet sich in Aksum in Äthiopien. #Mancala heißt das Spiel, bei dem legt man Spielsteine in die Mulden im Stein.
Wir kennen Spuren von Spielen in vielen Kulturen, kreuz und quer durch die Zeiten.
Ein Blick auf die Geschichte von Gesellschaftsspielen:
https://www.miss-jones.de/2022/08/19/leserfrage-seit-wann-gibt-es-gesellschaftspiele/
everydaybear went live on Twitch. Catch up on their Oh!Ware VOD now.
sort of? I don't really play them but I'm a huge fan of Senet (ancient Egyptian game thought to be one of the first ever board games). I used to play it with my kids a lot. Also Mancala.
if there are too many rules I glaze over and it's not fun lol
🎮 Mancala, trò chơi board game cổ điển, đã có mặt trên Android và iOS! Ứng dụng này bao gồm các biến thể Kalah, Oware và Congkak. Chơi với máy hoặc bạn bè trên cùng thiết bị hoặc online. Tải ngay!
#Mancala #BoardGame #Game #Android #iOS #TròChơi #CờBàn #ĐiệnThoại #MobileGame
https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1n8987w/board_game_mancala_for_android_and_ios/
🎮 Trải nghiệm trò chơi Mancala cổ điển trên điện thoại của bạn! Ứng dụng này có các biến thể Kalah, Oware và Congkak. Chơi với bot hoặc người chơi khác trên cùng một thiết bị hoặc trực tuyến. Tải xuống ngay trên Google Play và AppStore!
#Mancala #BoardGame #Game #Android #iOS #CờMancala #TròChơi #ĐiệnThoại
https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1n8987w/board_game_mancala_for_android_and_ios/
TL;DR: I used Google Gemini 2.5 Pro to create what might be the strongest (and perhaps only) app for the Namibian board game Hus. Gemini wrote ~99% of the code, cutting development time from weeks to hours, despite minor issues with specific rules and refactoring. My focus shifted from code quality to basic checks. Early analysis suggests player 2 has a winning advantage in the standard Hus rules on a 8x4 board.
With the (massive) help of Google Gemini 2.5 pro (experimental) I present: the probably strongest Hus playing app on this planet. Hus is a board game stemming from Namibia.
(okay, seems to be the only one, according to googling, and Gemini took a single prompt to implement a basic Alpha-Beta tree search, that works very well for a game where players have something like 10 moves, and complete information).
https://agsteiner.neocities.org/Kalaha/hus.html
Experience from working with Gemini on this:
- it could code 99%, making virtually no bugs. I changed only about 10 lines of code of >1000 lines of Javascript
- we did have a longish dispute because it wouldn't want to understand how a game where both players move their stones counterclockwise works.
- Creating a second flavor of the game that works a bit differently didn't work so well, so refactoring is still not its strength.
- Overall creating four independent little apps (one playing with one ruleset, the other with a slightly different ruleset, and two simulations to do fast engine-vs-engine match to get strong game logs) took me 2-3 hours, instead of 2-3 weeks that hand coding would have taken.
- I notice that I am moving away from trying to understand the code, and wanting beautiful code to something like "developer due dilligence" (did a hacker compromise the AI and code a virus into my app), and not caring too much about how the code looks.
Also from a lengthy 12-ply self-play it seems that this variation of the game is won for player 2. First evaluation is "player 2 wins 13 stones", which is pretty decisive already.
The original variation where you don't capture stones on the row behind the inner one gives more balanced games.
#hus #kalaha #mancala #googlegemini #gemini25pro #llm #ai #development
TL;DR: My game AI kept freezing. It wasn't a bug in the AI, but a feature of the game allowing infinite move loops. I fixed it by adding a move limit rule, and now the AI runs faster and beats me even more effectively.
Fun little story about that: once in a while, the Alpha-Beta AI would just hang. So I needed to debug an AI-generated Alpha-Beta search that I before handn't bothered to understand.
Turns out there is nothing wrong with the AI.
Turns out that this variation of a game can have positions where a move simply loops.
Only after I asked ChatGPT to create a python script that does these sequences of "sowing steps" that make the heart of the game, it told me that after a sequence of 343 such steps, we're back at the initial position.
Then added a "you may only sow 100 hands of stones in a move rule" and now all is fine.
(this also explained why a 6-ply search would take forever - these kind of positions are fairly frequent).
The good news: now I have not only the 4-ply search that destroys me but the app can do up to 8-ply without taking too much time, and destroying me even more.
My dev learnings:
- asking ChatGPT to visualize a JSON is fast.
- asking ChatGPT to simulate a given issue in python is fun and gives insights fast.
Spent two hours with Gemini 2.5 creating that African bean game, complete with an AI that can beat me.
Challenges: the AI faced issues with the fact that both players play in their own area, each counterclockwise.
Actually this was the only manual change I needed to do - rename the upper row cells from 7..0 to 0..7. Couldn't bother to get the AI to do this. But apart from that it was just a (3 times refined) prompt, and one more prompt to implement a simple AI (find the move that maximizes AI stones - player stones), no alphabeta or anything.
Want to try it out?
(need to add the rules someday).
If I would have had to code this myself, it would probably be a 2 week project. For these small apps, the current top notch AIs give you orders of magnitude of speed. Of course this massively declines (still) with the size of the project.
I kinda love it when customers take way better photos than we do.
Miss Jones
everydaybear
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Scientia
Reddit Tech VN Bot
Karlheinz Agsteiner