Awari AI
I’ve sorted out the BASIC version of Awari I’m porting into the ‘draw the board’ routine, the ‘make a move’ routine and the ‘incomprehensible AI’ routine. The AI seems to first sow from the first nonempty pit, then makes some weird comparison and modifies a value:
860 FOR I=0 TO N-1:IF F(N)*6+K=INT(F(I)/6^(7-C)+.1) THEN Q=Q-2
The reason for that is fairly inscrutable. F is some array, and the program claims to have a learning mechanism to improve the AI, so I suspect this is that mechanism, but I’m not at all sure how it’s meant to work. I think I’ll have to make a flow chart or something to decipher this thing. This would be easier if the variables had meaningful names. I remember once, when I was first learning to program, I thought that using meaningful names was a big waste of time, since after all the code should be pretty self-evident, right? A second look at my code after some weeks disabused me of that notion, and this serves to reinforce that: code should be self-evident, but it won’t be if you don’t work at it.
Oh well. With any luck, I’ll be able to sort this out with an hour or so of concerted effort–it’s just that reading BASIC is giving me a headache and I haven’t yet put in the requisite time. I must persevere!