In this paper, we argue that the insertion of domain knowledge into ensemble of diverse evolutionary checkers can produce improved strategies and reduce evolution time by restricting search space. The evolutionary approach for game is different from the traditional one that exploits knowledge of the opening, middle, and endgame stages, so that it is not sometimes efficient to evolve simple heur...

A novel native stochastic local search algorithm for solving k-term DNF problems is presented. It is evaluated on hard k-term DNF problems that lie on the phase transition and compared to the performance of GSAT and WalkSAT type algorithms on SAT encodings of k-term DNF problems. We also evaluate state-of-the-art separate and conquer algorithms on these problems. Finally, we demonstrate the pra...

.....................................................................................iii Preface........................................................................................v Introduction of the thesis..................................................................ix Paper I: Fossil Endgame? Strategic pricing and taxation of oil in a World of Climate change

The paper examines t h e s i m u l a t i o n of t h e b a s i c mechanisms of t h e chess endgame problem s o l u t i o n by man. The experimental r e s u l t s o f a p s y c h o l o g i c a l i n v e s t i g a t i o n i n t o the mechanics o f s t r u c t u r i s a t i o n , g e n e r a l i z a t i o n , and g o a l f o r m a t i o n o f a s i t u a t i o n have been presented and a semi o t i...

Bagha Chal, or Moving Tiger, is an ancient Nepali board game also known as Tigers and Goats. We describe the game, some of its characteristics, and insights gained from an incomplete computer analysis. As in some other games such as Merrill’s, play starts with a placement phase where twenty pieces are dropped on the board, followed by a sliding phase; during both phases pieces may be captured. ...

As several countries now confront COVID-19 surges, Israel may be crossing over to other side of the pandemic. Whereas 5.5 million new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections were reported globally last week, only 398 (compared with >50,000 in January). Already, 54% Israel's 9.2 citizens have been fully vaccinated, considerably more than most countries. In comi...

Fanorona is the national board game of Madagascar. The game’s complexity is approximately the same as that of checkers. In this article we present a search-based approach for weakly solving this game. It is a well-chosen combination of Proof-Number search and endgame databases. Retrograde analysis is used to generate the endgame databases in which every position with 7 or fewer pieces on the bo...