Even Wins

An odd number of matches are placed in a row. You take turns with the computer picking up between one and four objects. The game ends when there are no objects left. The winner is the one with an even number of objects picked up.

Computer Computer
Board
You
 

History

Games won

Comp: Human:

What the computer will do

The computer starts out only knowing the rules of the game. Using simple techniques of artificial intelligence (cybernetics), the computer gradually learns to play from its mistakes until it plays a very good game.

This table shows how many matches the computer plans to take for a given situation

Original (Creative Computing) Notes

After 20 games, the computer is a challenge to beat. Variation in the human's style of play seems to make the computer learn more quickly.

If you plot the learning curve of this program, it closely resembles classical human learning curves from psychological experiments.

Eric Peters at DEC wrote the GAME OF EVEN WINS.

Subsequent notes

This game uses VBScript and may producing a warning in your browser. It won't work unless you allow active content (i.e. the script). You can look at the source to see that there's nothing to be worried about. It wont' work if your browser doesn't support vbscript. :-( Sorry.

Walter de Jong adapted it to VBScript c2002 for fun and familiarisation with VBScript

Freevbcode published source