Computer Lasca

This page will include information about programs for playing Lasca, and, where possible, downloadable copies.

More information needed please.

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Alan Creak at the Computer Science Department has supervised two projects to write Lasca-playing programs:

Steven Lomas, Postgraduate project, 1986 : Operating system design. Steven wrote a programme to play Lasca. It used a straightforward minimax algorithm with lookahead, and performed quite well.

S. Lomas : An intelligent Lasca game playing programme (1986).

Graham Hood, Graduate Project, 1992 : Artificial intelligence in playing board games.
Graham wrote a programme to play Lasca. It could be used at various levels of look-ahead, and its performance varied from blindingly fast but stupid to excruciatingly slow but really rather clever. He had hoped to experiment with different strategies, but unfortunately there wasn't enough time. He did achieve a very smooth interface.

G. Hood : An intelligent Lasca-playing programme (1992).

Bruce Wilford

While a 2nd year student at UCL, Bruce Wilford wrote a Unix-based Lasca-playing program.

The program uses a quite standard mini-max technique, it grows the game tree as it goes, so that moves are searched in the order that previous moves suggested would yield the best results. It varies the lookahead level based on available memory and time, so it plays fairly quickly.

The program should run easily under Linux. For more information contact Bruce at bwilford@yahoo.com.