First off: the inaugural OpenTafl Computer Tafl Open has come to a close. It was a bit of an anticlimax, I must admit, but fun times nevertheless.

To recap, only one entry (J.A.R.L) made it in on time. On January 2nd, I had the AIs run their matches, and it was all over inside of 20 minutes, with a bit of technical difficulty time to boot. You can find the game records here.

To move one layer deeper into the recap, both AIs won one game each out of the match. J.A.R.L won in 22 moves, OpenTafl won in 18, giving the victory to OpenTafl. Disappointingly for me, OpenTafl played quite poorly in its stint as the attackers, allowing J.A.R.L to quickly set up a strong structure funneling its king to the bottom right of the board. Disappointingly for Jono, J.A.R.L seemed to go off the rails when it played the attacking side, leaving open ranks and files and leaving a certain victory for OpenTafl. Deeper analysis is coming, although, not being a great player myself, I can’t offer too much insight. (Especially given that neither AI played especially well.)

I do expect that, when Jono finishes fixing J.A.R.L, it’ll be stronger than OpenTafl is today. He intends on making its source code available in the coming year, as a starting point for further AI development. (If feasible, I hope to steal his distance-to-the-corner evaluation.)

There will be a 2017 OpenTafl Computer Tafl Open, with the same rules and schedule. I’ll be creating a page for it soon.

Next: progress on OpenTafl itself. It’s difficult to overstate how much has happened in the past year. Last January, OpenTafl was a very simple command-line program with none of the persistent-screen features it has today; it had no support for external AIs, no multiplayer, no notation or saved games, and a comparatively rudimentary built-in AI.

The first major change of the year was switching to Lanterna, and that enabled many of the following ones. Lanterna, the terminal graphics framework OpenTafl uses to render to the screen, allows for tons of fancy features the original, not-really-solution did not. Menus, for one. For another, a UI which makes sense for the complicated application OpenTafl was destined to become. Although it’s the easiest thing to overlook in this list of features, it’s the most foundational. Very few of the remaining items could have happened without it.

Next up: external AI support. In the early days, I only planned for OpenTafl to be a fun little toy. At the end of that plan, it might have been something I could use to play my weekly (… well, kind of) tafl game without having to deal with a web interface. (For what it’s worth, Tuireann’s playtaflonline.com renders that goal obsolete, unless you really like OpenTafl.)

Later on, as I got into work on OpenTafl’s built-in AI, I realized what an amazing object of mathematical interest it is, and that it has not, to date, seen anything like the kind of study it richly deserves. As such, I decided I wanted OpenTafl to be a host for that sort of study. Much of what we know about chess, go, and other historical abstract strategy games comes from the enormous corpus of games played. That corpus does not yet exist for tafl games, the amazing efforts of people like Aage Nielsen and Tuireann notwithstanding. The quickest way to develop a good corpus is to play lots of games between good AIs. Good AIs are hard to come by if every AI author also needs to build a UI and a host.

So, OpenTafl fills the void: by implementing OpenTafl’s straightforward engine protocol, AI authors suddenly gain access to a broad spectrum of opponents. To start with, they can play their AI against all other AIs implementing the protocol, any interested human with a copy of OpenTafl, and possibly even the tafl mavens at playtaflonline.com. Not only that, but the AI selfplay mode allows AI authors to verify progress, a critical part of the development process.

Multiplayer was an obvious extension, although it hasn’t seen a great deal of use. (There are, admittedly, better systems out there.) It proved to be relatively straightforward, and although there are some features I’d like to work out eventually (such as tournaments, a more permanent database, and a system for client-side latency tracking to allow for client-side correction of the received server clock stats), I’m happy with it as it stands.

OpenTafl is also the first tafl tool to define a full specification for tafl notation, and the first to fully implement its specification. The Java files which parse OpenTafl notation to OpenTafl objects, and which turn OpenTafl objects into OpenTafl notation, are in the public domain, free for anyone to modify for their own AI projects, another major benefit.

In defining OpenTafl notation, I wanted to do two things: first, to craft a notation which is easily human-readable, in the tradition of chess notation; and second, to remain interoperable with previous tafl notation efforts, such as Damian Walker’s. The latter goal was trivial; OpenTafl notation is a superset of other tafl notations. The former goal was a little more difficult, and the rules notation is notably rather hard to sight-read unless you’re very familiar with it, but on balance, I think the notations people care about most—moves and games—are quite clear.

Having defined a notation and written code to parse and generate it, I was a hop, skip, and jump away from saved games. Shortly after, I moved on to replays and commentaries. Once again a first: OpenTafl is the first tool which can be used to view and edit annotations on game replays. Puzzles were another obvious addition. In 2017, I hope to release puzzles on a more or less regular basis.

Last and the opposite of least, the AI. Until the tournament revealed that J.A.R.L is on par with or better than OpenTafl, OpenTafl was the strongest tafl-playing program in existence. I’ve written lengthy posts on the AI in the past, and hope to come up with another one soon, talking about changes in v0.4.5.0b, which greatly improved OpenTafl’s play on large boards.

Finally, plans. 2017 will likely be a maintenance year for OpenTafl, since other personal projects demand my time. I may tackle some of the multiplayer features, and I’ll probably dabble in AI improvements, but 2017 will not resemble 2016 in pace of work. I hope to run a 2017 tafl tournament, especially since the engine protocol is now stable, along with OpenTafl itself. I may also explore creating a PPA for OpenTafl.

Anyway, there you have it: 2016 in review. Look for the AI post in the coming weeks.