Reconstructing strategy in the game of Sinat

After commenter Hans told me that my Sínat game wasn't playing up to par with him, I decided to see whether I could code a better strategy into the game. I figured it shouldn't be hard to make an improvement. Afterall, the only thing the computer is programmed to do is to find a list of available moves and then pick a move randomly from that list. How could any strategy be worse than that?

A few days ago, I coded a new strategy on my computer to test out. Basically I told my program to evaluate each move and favour those moves which yielded greater protection of one's own pieces at the greatest expense of its opponent's protection. Seems right, yes? Apparently not. After I played the game, I still came out on top without much fuss and that got me a little curious.

So I decided that I would seperate my random algorithm from this new algorithm and have them battle it out. I called the "random" strategy Lateesha, for kicks, while I baptized the other "protection" strategy Shanequa. With Lateesha in red and Shanequa in blue I unleashed the two algorithms against each other for 20 turns to see what the statistical outcome would be.

The results were surprising. Our ol' lady of the block Lateesha won 55% of the time (11 out of 20 moves) over the new kid Shanequa!! What?? Yes, apparently randomness is better than being protective! It appears that this game does not reward overcautiousness because by being too focussed on one's own protection, one's pieces will be slower to get to the end of the board while one's opponent's pieces may pass one by. As a result, I've so far changed nothing in the A.I. programming.

Now I have to think up a better strategy. Back to the drawing board.

An Ancient Egyptian boardgame to appease readers

After a shamelessly long period of inactivity here on Paleoglot due to partying, Valentine's Day, joining the Aegeanet forum (possibly to my chagrin), a bit of laziness, a nasty chest cold, and obsessively programming my own game of Sínat (an ancient Egyptian boardgame) while experimenting with the Adobe-Flash-yumminess of Sprout Builder, I have yet to reorganize my blogsite like I wanted to and categorize my various files and such (Etruscan Dictionary pdf, hypotheses on Pre-Proto-Indo-European, and now this Sinat game) under more easily accessible links from the main page. Unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day, yet I need 8 to 10 hours of sleep or else I get crabby. Go figure!

At any rate, for now, please help me test out my game (the link is down below). Some of you may be confused by my spelling of the name. Normally people spell it "Senet" but this is the annoying "Sir Budge" way of bastarding the Egyptian language by lazily imposing the vowel "e" between written consonants. Remember, afterall, Egyptian seldom indicated vowels in hieroglyphics unless writing foreign names like that of the legendary Ptolemy known as Cleopatra who was of Macedonian heritage. The name of the game literally means "passing" and since it's related to Coptic šina "to pass", the name in Middle Egyptian (that is, the language as it was spoken around 1500 BCE or so) may be reconstucted as *sínat.

I have lots more to say about this interesting game such as mythical symbolisms subtlely embedded into the design of the game, Kendall's rules on which I base my program, some minor reinterpretations of game rules that I needed to impose while coding the details in order to keep it from being laborious, etc., etc. Consider this game a "beta" version and I'm aware of some bugs (e.g. the "Roll Dice" button flashes pointlessly in computer vs. computer mode) but despite my hideous programming, I believe it should now be playable with a friend or alone with the computer without exploding. However, fear not, friends. This is *not* the final product yet and I will be making modifications to the programming and visual aesthetics as I go along until I'm reasonably satisfied that I've ironed out all usability issues. As I said, the rules are more or less that of Timothy Kendall and a short primer of them can be learned from this link. I use the 5-pawn variant rather than 7 although it sounds like 5, 7 or even 10 pawns were used by Ancient Egyptians.

Now relax yourself this weekend and...

Try a game of Sínat!