Breakthrough game page

DOORBRAAK is a 7x7 Breakthrough version, to play against your friends or against the PC!

Download doorbraak.zip over here!

BREAKTHROUGH is a new, simple strategy game. Read about it at boardgames.about.com/breakthrough and read the rules of the game at www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/breakthrough.html. The goal of the game is to get one of your airplanes on the last row of your opponent.

To practice, I've included the option to play against the PC. The Artificial Intelligence in the game makes use of Alpha-Beta pruning and the killer heuristic.

Visual basic source code included

Included in the download package is the Visual Basic source-code of the project. I hope you can see what Alpha-Beta pruning actually is. Basicly it is a 'brute-force' technique. That is, the computer tries out all combinations and draws all these combinations of moves out in a 'tree of moves'. Than at each leaf of the tree, the program makes use of a 'static evaluation function'. This is a function to calculate 'how good' the reached position actually is. And because the PC looks at all possible moves that it can do, and all possible counter-moves you can do, and so on, it can determine what the 'best move' is.
Go to my hexxagon page if you want to read more about letting the PC decide how to do a move. (This will probably only interest programmers and the better more readable code is in doorbraak instead of hexxagon)

Questions?

If you have questions about the source code let me know. And yes, the source code might not be entirely readable for english viewers, because I'm more used to the dutch language...sorry :-) This might be a bit unfortunate for people who want to understand all my remarks so if you have any questions about them...I'm here to help you out.

Also, when looking at the sourcecode you might come up with new ideas for the code. If that is the case, please let me know, so that others can also make use of the things you found out. Please make use of the 'contact' link above in the header of this page. When time permits I will explain a few things on this page about alpha-beta pruning, domove and undomove, evaluating the board etc.

Thanks

My thanks go out to Claude Chaunier who greatly helped me improve the PC-algorithm and gave alot of suggestions to improve the VB sourcecode.