The best move has the highest possible score, but it is also the one
leading to the most interesting game. This is a subjective notion, but
some heuristics can help, such as:
- a move sparing a blank is better than one using it
- a move with many prefixes and suffixes is better than one without
extensions
- a move "opening" the game is better than one blocking it
- a move leaving a nice rack is better than one leaving "bad" letters
At the moment, only the first heuristic is implemented.
Status:
It works well, but there are still a few details to improve/fix
More details about the changes:
- New dependency on Arabica and Libxml2 to parse the XML
- Loading the old format is still supported for this release, but won't be supported anymore in the next one
- Games are now only saved in the new format
- In training mode, the player is now created externally, like in the other modes
- Avoid using GameIO (the one from game/) whenever possible
- Do not use a FILE* argument anymore when loading a game
- Throw and catch exceptions correctly when a game cannot be loaded or saved
- The non-regression tests now use a new method to print the game history
But we don't need to sort them all the time, and in general we don't even need to keep all the rounds.
This commit greatly improves the search performance by filtering the results in 3 different ways, depending on the context:
- A limit to the number of results can be given (useful for the training mode). The kept results are the best ones, not the first ones found by the search.
- When only the best round is needed (when the AI is playing with level 100, or when preparing the rack for an explosive game), we don't need to keep rounds with a lower score
- When the AI has a level lower than 100, it is still possible to skip many rounds
The search limit in training mode is configurable (defaulting to 100) and can be deactivated.
- Improved the error message when the dictionary cannot be loaded at startup
- Updated the french translation
- Made some Game fields private
- Added more constness
- Removed logiv from the History class
- Used BOOST_FOREACH to simplify loops
- Remove useless annotations and doxygen blocks
- Added some constness
- Marked Training::setRack() as deprecated
- Improved compilation order in game/
- Use player names in the ncurses interface
- In training mode, create the hidden player in the constructor, not in start()
- When the AI has nothing to play, change the letters instead of simply passing
- New Makefile to build the win32 dependencies automatically (INSTALL file updated)
There are too many change to list properly, here is an overview of the main changes:
- the dictionary is now in C++
- the dictionary has a new format, where it is possible to specify the letters,
their points, their frequency, ... It is backwards compatible.
- Eliot now supports non-ASCII characters everywhere
- i18n of the compdic, listdic, regexpmain binaries
- i18n of the wxWidgets interface (now in english by default)
