A game of Othello, also known as Reversi, with minimal interface.
It knows the rules, and it understands how to interact with the user to play the game; and this turned out to be amazingly easy to implement in REALbasic, thanks to REALbasic's object orientation and control arrays.
Thus, as I explained in my original review of REALbasic, I was able to write the first version of this program in less than a day!
This amazed me, and the exercise also caused me to "get" REALbasic; from there on, I was hooked.
In the original program, there was absolutely no effort at providing the computer with any "intelligence" - the computer chose its moves at random. So it's a "dumb" Othello, which is why I call it Odummo.
In the current version, an option is provided to let the computer use a kind of strategy. This strategy is extremely simple-minded, not to say downright crude, and should by no means be confused with intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Intelligent Othello is an extremely deep and powerful problem (see http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/mic/publications.html). Nonetheless, at least it causes the computer's play to be vaguely sensible (though it still makes some obvious blunders).
matt neuburg, phd = matt@tidbits.com, http://www.tidbits.com/matt
