Mancala

This is a personal project to explore a topic from university that really interested me, game tree search!

I have recently been playing a lot of Mancala and wished to know how good my strategies, and specifically openers, are. Surely I could have just googled this but that is no fun. I am writing this in C since it is my perferred langauge and I wish for the search to be fast. I will be following a three phase structure to it's implementation:

• Phase 1:
  • console IO
  • Working mancala game
• Phase 2:
  • Multiple search strategies for best openings
    • Heuristics, such as seeing if the remaining seeds are enough to sway the game
  • Timings and simple data output / python graphing
• Phase 3:
  • Simple raylib visualization of games

I will be adding some of my results here when they are more complete.

Building

This project is going to be kept small and simple. A basic Makefile is provided with which you can simply run make in the current directory to build the mancala executable.