Velena, a Shannon-C type program which plays connect four perfectly
For AI researchers and computer games developers
Back in 1996 I wrote an MS-DOS program named Velena. It was based on the Ph.thesis of L.V.Allis,
and played connect 4 perfectly.
The program was able to always win if allowed to make the first move.
One year after I released the source code and subsequently some third party programs started to
include the Velena engine as a computer opponent. For some of them I personally helped the developers
to include my code into their application. Most notably:
4Free:
a freeware windows playing program from TwilightGames
Gnect/Four in a row:
included into Gnome Games package of most Linux distributions
Here's a link to my old and stale webpage where you can find
some documentation, references and my original work. Unfortunatelly it probably does not work anymore
on today systems...
