Approaches

Fair expectimax

Look a few moves ahead, take the best column on your own turns, and average over every sampled disc the game might deal.

Fair expectimaxfeatured

Paying the search for clears and reveals

Rewards clears and reveals inside search to test whether faster board flow improves survival.

rejectedrecorded

Fair expectimaxfeatured

The fair leaf evaluator

The hand-written board evaluator every search in this family uses at the bottom of its look-ahead, and the tuning bench its coefficients came from.

completedrecorded

Fair expectimax

Adding a rise-cycle residual to the evaluator

Adds a small rise-cycle term to board evaluation and preserves the fitted weights for later work.

completedrecorded

Fair expectimax

Bringing back the old placement rewards

Restores immediate move rewards inside deeper search, then tests a reduced two-term version.

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Hand-built heuristics and shallow search

Scores visible board traits, adds them together, and plays the highest-valued column.

Hand-built heuristics and shallow search

Edge priority

Turn two claims from an experienced player into measurable evaluator changes by attacking high covered discs and distrusting edge columns.

Hand-built heuristics and shallow search

Phase horizon

Judge a board by how it will look when the next row rises. The same board is more dangerous one drop from a rise than five drops away.

rejected

Hand-built heuristics and shallow search

Tunneling

Dig a channel down beside the tall side of the board so that the dangerous gray discs high up can actually be reached and opened.

completed

Hand-built heuristics and shallow search

Virtual ignition

Before choosing a column, imagine dropping a few imaginary discs onto the board to see which arrangements would go off like a firework, and prefer the boards that would.

rejected

Lifetime objective

Judge a move by how much longer the game will still last, rather than by how many points it scores right now.

Lifetime objective

Chain-reveal leaf substrate

Adds seven reveal-construction terms (aligned double hit, chain-to-crack, entombed high, and their danger-gated forms) on top of the frozen fair leaf through a memoised, generated search whose zero-weight arm is gated bit-identical to the unchanged search.

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Oracle and curriculum research

Let a planner cheat (show it the hidden numbers and the discs still to come) then try to teach a player who cannot cheat.

Oracle and curriculum research

Accessible energy

Turn the board properties that separate a future-reading planner's positions from ordinary ones into a handful of readable numbers, and let a legal search use them.

rejectedrecorded