Kalah

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Kalah, a two-player abstract strategy game in the Mancala family invented in 1940 by William Julius Champion, Jr., commercialized since 1944 and patented in 1952 (Design) and 1955 (Rules). The Kalah brand name was protected in the US from 1970 until 2002, but was copycat under various names and variants such as Conference (Mieg's, 1965), Sahara (Pelikan, 1976) and Bantumi (Nokia Mobiles since 2000).

=Kalah in AI= Kalah has a long history in Artificial Intelligence research. First Kalah programs were already written in the 60s, Alex Bell popularized Kalah programming in 1968. In 1968, James R. Slagle and Philip Bursky used Kalah in Theorem-Proving, and in 1970, Slagle and Dixon illustrated their M & N search algorithm with Kalah as well. =Jugend forscht= Paul Erich Frielinghaus, a German actor, developed a Kalah program (he called the game Serata) as High School student in 1978 and participated in the German youth science competition Jugend forscht.

=Solving Kalah= The notation (m,n)-Kalah refers to Kalah with m pits per side and n stones in each pit. In 2000, Kalah was solved by Geoffrey Irving, Jeroen Donkers, and Jos Uiterwijk for all m ≤ 6 and n ≤ 6, except (6,6). (6,6)-Kalah was solved in 2011 by Anders Carstensen and Kim Skak Larsen.

=See also=
 * Awari
 * Bao

=Selected Publications=
 * Roland Silver (1961). The Kalah Game Playing Program. Digital Equipment Corporation, pdf, and PDP Application Note as pdf
 * R. Russell (1964). Kalah- the game and program. Stanford artificial intelligence project, Memo. No. 22.
 * Alex Bell (1968). Kalah on Atlas. Literature: Reports hosted by Atlas Computer Laboratory
 * James R. Slagle, Philip Bursky (1968). Experiments With a Multipurpose, Theorem-Proving Heuristic Program. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 1
 * James R. Slagle, John K. Dixon (1969). Experiments With Some Programs That Search Game Trees. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 16, No. 2, pdf
 * James R. Slagle, John K. Dixon (1970). Experiments with the M & N Tree-Searching Program. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 3
 * Geoffrey Irving, Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk (2000). Solving Kalah. 5th Computer Olympiad Workshop
 * Geoffrey Irving, Jeroen Donkers, Jos Uiterwijk (2000). Solving Kalah. ICGA Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3, pdf
 * Wee Chong Oon, Yew Jin Lim (2003). An Investigation on Piece Differential Information in Co-Evolution on Games Using Kalah. Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2003), Vol. 3, pdf

=External Links=
 * Kalah from Wikipedia
 * Kalah from Mancala World
 * Kalah page by Jeroen Donkers
 * Kalah: A Commercial Count and Capture Game from Elliott Avedon Museum and Archive of Games, University of Waterloo
 * Solving (6,6)-Kalaha by Anders Carstensen, first published April 14, 2011

=References=

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