Approaches

Heuristic evaluation

Score a board with a hand-written sum of visible traits, then play the column whose board scores highest.

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Heuristic evaluationfeatured

Paying the search for clears and reveals

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

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Heuristic evaluationfeatured

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.

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Heuristic evaluation

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.

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Heuristic evaluation

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.

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Heuristic evaluation

Bringing back the old placement rewards

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

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Heuristic evaluation

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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Heuristic evaluation

Edge priority

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

Heuristic evaluation

Leaf Reweight

Turns the nineteen weights of the reference search's hand-written board-scoring function into run-time data, so that refitted weight vectors can be tested with nothing else about the search changed.

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Heuristic evaluation

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.

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Heuristic evaluation

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.

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Heuristic evaluation

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.

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