Here are a couple of questions I'd love your feedback on:

Is the highest Robot level challenging enough for top players? Or do we need a Robot that is harder to beat?

Is an advanced robot logic ever going to win games because of good "decision making" or will it be stronger purely because it can process so many more counting operations?

By Joe Ruby on Thursday, July 24, 2003 - 06:21 pm:

Ummm... the robot never tries to get the first free move (or if it does, it's not very good at it at all!!!) if it could do this, it may be able to win a few more games...
Also, it doesn't seem to take into account the fact that forced spaces dissappear after move 44
Example: i had 2 lines of 14 that could be connected with a ryy. it was the robot's move with one tile in the bag, and he had a ryy that couldn't be played until all the tiles were drawn. It did NOT play this tile, and during it's "& forced" phase, it had to connect these tiles, and gave me 29 points and the win. Since the bot had a line of 22, this move was the difference between a win and a loss. If it is possible, i would like to see a robot that thinks about both of these things.

By Matt Peek on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 12:46 am:

I think decisions based on strategy are far more important than technical counting decisions (so long as these aren't completely ignored). Thus I also believe a robot with better skills in this area would compete better with the top players - I and no doubt other players have no problems winning many consecutive games against Robot. This may be wishful thinking, as in chess it has been observed that the top players can still easily beat powerful computers due to human intuition skills. In tantrix, these skills may be harder to 'teach' a computer than chess, because of the random factor and possible greater variety of unrelated strategies - whereas in chess perfect analysis might be possible.