Otherwise, the next prioritization step is whether a trap for the AI exists, implemented in the third generation; if it exists and the subsequent player move would not result in a human player win (foundMax[trapMoveFlag] check), then the move that would lead to a trap is played. Currently, the AI does not try to prevent the player from setting up their own traps, which was useful for beginners who are training and learning more Connect Four strategy. Each player has an equal number of pieces (21) initially to drop one at a time from the top of the board.

Connect Four AI - Cornell University Connect Four AI - Cornell University

by placing the coin in that column (assuming optimal play of the opponent, otherwise you can win faster).

One other feature that could be added to our AI is the capability to look further ahead at more game states. The Phantom 4 Advanced's camera has a wide-angle lens specially designed for aerial photography, with an aperture range of F2. The goal was not only to develop an AI with a certain degree of challenge for a human player, but also to accelerate the program to perform and make decisions much faster than a software-based AI with the same behavior would be able to. Notice that the alpha here in this section is the new_score, and when it is greater than the current value, it will stop performing the recursion and update the new value to save time and memory.

Rushed Review of Connect 4 Advanced (Smoothsmith) | Score Four

Then, the minimizer will take the next turn, which has a worst-case initial value that equals positive infinity. There are various strategies to win 4 in a row, the steps above explain some of the best ones to try.The weaknesses of this design, as we observed, were still that it was unable to detect human player traps (since it could not look far enough ahead) and also that it would often find itself in winning trap configurations, but because it did not recognize them, would give the human player opportunities to block it. This initial AI, along with the subsequent iterations, was implemented in our final design due to the value that it provided for accurately detecting if the AI needed to make an immediate move to either (A) prevent itself from losing, or (B) win by connecting four immediately. Since our implementation of a standard Connect Four board has 6 rows, this required 6 SRAM reads before computation could be performed, with each read requiring 3 clock cycles (or 60 ns) each.

Connect 4 Online: Beyond the Basics - Advanced Playing Connect 4 Online: Beyond the Basics - Advanced

This would also lead to scenarios wherein the AI would place a move that enabled the human player to win on the immediate next turn. As it was using a completely defensive heuristic, it would successfully make moves that blocked long connections and would prevent the human player from easily connecting four in a row. A basic strategy of any game is that if you do not want to lose you must prevent your opponent from winning. We accomplish this by creating thousands of videos, articles, and interactive coding lessons - all freely available to the public.

The goal is to lead your opponent into unwanted moves, which enable you the freedom of developing traps for the next steps. In the image above, if the human player were to place their disc in column 2, they would be able to win on their next turn in column 2. For example, you might build up a diagonal 3 that would use the space under the game-winning space to give you 4 in a row. Contact the support team to ask about enhanced permissions, allowing you to view all cases for your account, manage users and perform password resets.

Connect 4 - Strategies and Tips - Pro Game Guides How to win at Connect 4 - Strategies and Tips - Pro Game Guides

However, the logic for this AI is the dominant behavior in our final implementation since we deemed it rather sufficient in terms of gameplay difficulty. It then checks to see if a move in this column is necessary to block a human player win on the next move; if so, it assigns this move the next highest value. This would change the AI behavior to prevent it from making a move that would cause it to lose on the next turn (unless forced to), and would also give us an opportunity to implement a pseudo-minimax algorithm. The trapDeterminer module first utilizes seven winFinder modules to determine if any of the moves given the input gameState can generate an AI win, which the human player would most likely block in its next move. Interestingly, when tuning the number of depths at the minimax function from high (6 for example) to low (2 for example), the AI player may perform worse.

Players that enjoy playing Connect 4 might also like Gomoku, increasing the challenge with a giant board and 5 pieces to connect. If you're having trouble building up much of an offense, you could also try distracting your opponent or making comments to try to get in their head and get them flustered so they make a mistake.