Re: Mancala solved!

[Chris Nash <chris_nash@prodigy.net>]

Hi folks

> "To figure out what happens in the game, computer scientists John W. Romein
> and Henri E. Bal of the Free University in Amsterdam wrote a computer
> program that calculates the best move and eventual outcome for all
> 889,063,398,406 positions that can possibly occur in the game."
> "The results were stored in a 778-gigabyte database."

Romein has published an interactive version of the database at http://awari.cs.vu.nl/ that will
return the optimal plays for any given position (and thus, among other things, play as an
unbeatable player). I've never had any luck getting the thing to work, but even if you can't
there's a lot of interesting statistics there.

- Chris