The first submission to the 2016 OpenTafl Computer Tafl Open arrived in my inbox yesterday morning. Since I had not yet finished my coffee at work, I decided to open it up and extend my break a bit.

J.A.R.L was developed by Jonathan Teutenberg, who comes to us from the java-gaming.org forum (under the name Jono). It’s a fairly standard iterative deepening depth-first search player, the same structure as OpenTafl’s AI, with two fascinating features.

First, it uses as a component in its evaluation function the distance to a king victory in a simple abstraction of the game. In the simplified version, only the king is allowed to move, and he can move through pieces with a move count penalty. The score is a combination of the abstract distance to each corner, the material balance, and the freedom of the king’s men.

Second, it does some advanced pruning of the search tree, along with some move ordering. Moves which make or avoid captures are weighted heavily and searched more deeply, while states which are much worse than alternatives and worse than the current position are not expanded.

The upshot is an AI which seems to have no small measure of strength to it, enough so that a game against it was worth commenting on, to some degree. (Granted, only because it lost a particular corner endgame I’ve seen come up before.) My suspicion after one game is that it’s one of the best AIs for the attacking side I’ve played to date. I look forward to seeing it in action in the tournament.