jarrin - Arctic Othello

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jarrin > Interests > Programming

Arctic Othello

Game in Progress

The other day Andy and I decided to play a game I'd owned but never played called "Overturn". It's part Boggle, part Scrabble and part Othello. Towards the end of our first game, Andy told me she didn't know how to play Othello. Since I don't actually own a copy of Othello I had to come up with another way to teach her.

About eleven years ago I wrote an Othello game that could be played via the World Wide Web. It was my first foray into CGI scripting, written entirely in Perl and hosted on minn.net (my ISP at the time) until an inifinite loop in my code caused one of their servers to go down. The game-play algorithms are fairly easy to code and I built three straight-forward difficulty levels for the computer (Polar Bear) AI (one is purely random, the other always captures the most number of pieces, the third uses weighted values for the various positions).

Because Andy likes penguins, and because polar bears are penguins' arch-enemies, it was only natural to use them as game pieces. Everything else just fell into place.

I wrote this (from nothing to completion) in about three hours this afternoon. The executable is only 108kb but you have to have the Microsoft DotNet framework (v1.1) installed in order to make it go. Enjoy!

Requires the Microsoft .NET Framework (v1.1)

Arctic Othello v1.1

Programming

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