Take Two

I’ve released a new version of Desdemona, my Reversi game. From the release note:

Fixed a nasty bug in the AI which could lead it to make strange (and terrible) moves near the end of the game. Also fixed an error in the search optimisation code that caused the AI to perform much weaker than it should be.

Given the latter fix I also took the opportunity to overhaul the difficulty levels. There was too little difference between them. The same range of levels from 1-10 is available, but they now represent a wider range of ability in the AI.

Difficulty level 1 is about the same as it was before. However, at level 10 it will now take about 22 seconds to search for a move, up from about 10 seconds previously. (Because of the bugfixes, however, the prior version would have to use about 5 minutes or more to perform as well!)