Programs to play Twixt

Current Twixt-playing programs

• See this page for some information about my first program, called "T1" (no longer developed).
• See this page for some information about my second program, called "T1j".
• The Twixt-playing program, which was formerly hosted at www.twixt.de, can now be found here, and also at http://home.infocity.de/Mike.Wiechmann/. It looks nice, but plays not too strong. (German language.)
• Philippe Van Schendel has a very interesting site: www.k2z.org (currently down). It is a multiplayer online server for Twixt with a java or win32 client, the client includes a nice twixt-playing program.
• Arnd Zapletal (a_zapletal(at)web.de) was developing a Twixt-Program. Current status of his program is unknown.
• Another Twixt-Program: http://www.buus.us/Peri_Damon/Video%20Game%20AMOK/Index.htm (Windows only). The playing strenth is similar to www.twixt.de.
• This page about Twixt-programming is worth reading.
• Please give me a note if you have any information about other Twixt-Programs. Thanks.

Other Twixt-programs

• JTwixt is a "Twixt game analyzer program". A great program, but it does not contain a computer player.
• This project at sourceforge is an implementation of Twixt which allows matches between two human players connected over a network. It does not contain a computer player.

The Computer Olympiad

TwixT is a two-player abstract board game, invented by Alex Randolph. A short introduction to the rules can be found here: http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/proprietary/twixt/twixt1.html. As for Go, it is hard to write a program for TwixT although the rules are quite simple. The number of possible moves is large and judging a board position is fairly difficult. Currently no program for TwixT exists, at least not to my knowledge.

This is a call to write TwixT-programs for the Computer Olympiad 2003, I plan to finish my own TwixT-program by then.

• The 11th Computer Olympiad took place in Torino, Italy (May 20 - June 4, 2006).
• The 10th Computer Olympiad took place at Taipei, Taiwan in September 2005.
• The 9th Computer Olympiad took place at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, July 4th - 12th, 2004.
• The 8th Computer Olympiad took place at Graz (Austria) in November 2003.

More twixted links

• Mark Winands added a Twixt-page to the website of the ICGA - International Computer Games Association
• Another great source for information on Twixt is David Bush's site.
• Twixt auf Deutsch: Hiespielchen.

Notation

• American notation:

  The notation for moves is described (and used) in gamerz.net.

  An asterisk '*' can be used for "automatic" links, but this is optional.

• German notation:

  Dashes '-' are added after the coordinates, one for each "auto link" played.

  If a link is removed, this is written down in brackets (e.g. (U8-T10) means that the link between the pegs U8 and T10 is removed).

  There is no syntax for 'non-automatic linking' known to me.

Rules

• The convention for coordinates: The rows are numbered 1 to 24, and the columns are lettered A to X.
• The player playing top-bottom makes the first move.
• We should use the pie-rule. (Explanation by David Bush: "After the first player (Red) makes the first move, the 2nd player has the option of responding normally as Black, or swapping sides. If sides are swapped, the player who moved first as Red is now Black, and makes the next move. Sides may be swapped only once per game. If the 2nd player chooses not to swap after Red's first move, then sides may not be swapped at all that game.")
• For the normal move, 'automatic linking' is used: Any links which can be added to this peg, without removing other links, are automatically added.
• It has to be discussed if 'Unlinking' and 'non-automatic linking' has to be implemented for the first Twixt-programs.

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