DECEMBER 29TH, 2012
By AMBS
In the last two days I engaged in developing Reversi, just to learn how the minimax algorithm works. To make it easier to share, and remove GUI toolkit dependencies, my approach was using HTML (a simple page with a 8×8 table), three images (empty cell, black or white cells), a CSS file that fills empty cells or used cells, and highlights movement possibilities, and a couple of JavaScript files (jquery, a reversi-board.js file to handle the board as an object, a reversi.js file to handle the interface between the board and the HTML file, and finally a minimax.js file to handle the minimax algorithm.
At the moment the game is playable, and not too slow. The code can be optimized to make it faster. In the next couple of days I might do that.
Also, regarding the AI code, it can be made better. In one side, the minimax algorithm can try to analyze more moves in advance (only three at the moment), in the other, the board evaluation function can be made better as well.
If you wish to play, go ahead: http://eremita.di.uminho.pt/~ambs/reversi
I am the Chair of the Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies. It is the first year this conference will take place, but some of its tracks have some history. There are three main tracks, on Human-Human Languages processing (processing of natural languages), Human-Computer Languages processing (processing of programming languages) and Computer-Computer Languages processing (communication languages, serialization languages, etc).
The conference will have its proceedings published in OASIcs, and a printed version will be available for the participants. A keynote by Alexander Paar is already confirmed. He will talk about an interesting topic. His presentation title is From Program Execution to Automatic Reasoning: Integrating Ontologies into Programming Languages.
The conference call for papers is still open (until March 28th).
Yesterday I gave an invited class on Classification Systems. I prepared some slides that are available on Slideshare. It is an opinionated view on four different types of classification: folksonomies, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies. The online version lost some quality, but you can download the PDF version. Hope this is interesting for someone.
