15 Dec
2003
15 Dec
'03
6:30 p.m.
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Scott Kim wrote:
I'm looking for a good Dots & Boxes program that plays an optimal game on a 4x4 dot grid (3x3 boxes). Anyone know of one?
David Wilson's, which you can play on the web: http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~dwilson/boxes/ In particular, he points out that to make it more fair, the second player should need to win by 3 instead of just by 1 -- because that's possible with optimal play, and winning by 1, as JHC pointed out, is too easy. (I first learned this from David Wilson, but I don't know if the original observation is due to him or not.) --Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu