Project Page: github/chaos

This is a basic AI for the game Order and Chaos.

Game Rules

I heard about the game Order and Chaos from Tom Scott’s youtube video

The basics of the game are as follows:

Two players have a role assigned, one is ORDER, the other is CHAOS
The game board is a 6x6 grid
The players alternate playing. Either player plays either an X or an O
The ORDER player wins if there is a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal set of five Xes OR five Oes
The CHAOS player wins by denying the ORDER playing such a set of five Xes or Oes until the game ends

AI

Simple AI with alpha-beta pruning

Heuristic

There are 32 possible sets of 5 positions which can be a WIN for the ORDER player.

12 horizontal
12 vertical
4 diagonal \
4 diagonal /

The heuristic evaluates each of those 32 lines and assigns it a value.

If there is a combination of Xes and Oes, then the value is -1 since order cannot win that line.
Otherwise the score is positive and depends on the number of filled spaces in the line (XXX is valued higher than XX)

The overall heuristic is a sum of all 32 line heuristics

To quickly lookup the line heuristic. I used a simple Python script (generator.py) which generates a 1024 element lookup table. The 5 positions in a line are converted to a 10 bit value (2 bits per position). That value can be instantly converted to a value by indexing into the lookup table.

play.js

This is a simple NodeJS script which plays two AIs against each other. It requires the AI to accept the current board state as an argument and writes out a move to stdout

It will play the AIs back and forth until one of them is determined to be the winner