Havannah (board game)

Havannah has "a sophisticated and varied strategy" and is best played on a base-10 hexagonal board, 10 hex cells to a side.

Since the first player to move in Havannah has a distinct advantage, the pie rule is generally implemented for fairness.

In 2002 Freeling offered a prize of 1000 euros, available through 2012, for any computer program that could beat him in even one game of a ten-game match.

However, since 2010 several Havannah-playing programs have applied Monte Carlo tree search techniques resulting in some notable improvement in playing strength.

However, MetaTotoro, based on Polygames[7] (an open-source project, initially developed by Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research and several universities[8]), won four times in a row on the board of size 8 against the human player with the best ELO rank on LittleGolem, who was also the winner of various tournaments.

It is a zero-learning based algorithm, as in AlphaZero, but with novelties: boardsize invariance thanks to fully convolutional neural networks (as in U-Net) and global pooling.