Connect Four

Home * Games * Connect Four



Connect Four, (Connect-Four, Connect 4, The Captain's Mistress, Four in a Row, Four in a Line) a tic-tac-toe like game in which two players drop discs into a 7x6 board. The first player to get four in a row, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, wins. The game was known as The Captain's Mistress, released in its current form by Milton Bradley in 1974 (Milton Bradley was acquired by Hasbro in 1984). Connect Four was first (weakly) solved by James D. Allen as announced in a rec.games.programmer posting on October 01, 1988, and only 15 days later, Victor Allis announced his independently discovered solution , described in his thesis.

=See also=
 * Connect Four @ 1st Computer Olympiad
 * Connect6
 * Gomoku
 * Infinite Connect Four
 * Renju

=Selected Publications=

1988 ...

 * Victor Allis (1988). A Knowledge-Based Approach of Connect Four: The Game is Over, White to Move Wins. M.Sc. Thesis, Report No. IR-163, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universteit, Amsterdam
 * Jos Uiterwijk, Jaap van den Herik, Victor Allis (1989). A Knowledge-Based Approach to Connect Four: The Game is Over, White to Move Wins. Heuristic Programming in AI 1
 * James D. Allen (1989). A note on the Computer Solution of Connect Four. Heuristic Programming in AI 1

1990 ...

 * James D. Allen (1990). Expert Play in Connect-Four. hosted by John Tromp
 * James D. Allen (1990). The Complete Book of CONNECT 4. Sterling Publishing

2000 ...

 * Hendrik Baier (2006). Der Alpha-Beta-Algorithmus und Erweiterungen bei Vier Gewinnt. Bachelor's thesis (German), TU Darmstadt, advisor Johannes Fürnkranz, pdf

2010 ...

 * James D. Allen (2010 ). The Complete Book of CONNECT 4: History, Strategy, Puzzles. 2nd edition, Sterling Publishing
 * Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Kazunori Yamaguchi, Tetsuro Tanaka, Tomoyuki Kaneko (2011). Infinite Connect-Four Is Solved: Draw. Advances in Computer Games 13
 * Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Tetsuro Tanaka, Kazunori Yamaguchi (2013). Cylinder-Infinite-Connect-Four except for Widths 2, 6, and 11 is Solved: Drawn. CG 2013
 * Yoshiaki Yamaguchi, Todd W. Neller (2015). First Player’s Cannot-Lose Strategy in Cylinder-Infinite-Connect-Four for Widths 2 and 6. Advances in Computer Games 14
 * Thomas Philip Runarsson, Simon Lucas (2015). On imitating Connect-4 game trajectories using an approximate n-tuple evaluation function. IEEE CIG 2015
 * Markus Thill (2015). Temporal Difference Learning Methods with Automatic Step-Size Adaption for Strategic Board Games: Connect-4 and Dots-and-Boxes. Master thesis, Technical University of Cologne, Campus Gummersbach, pdf

=Forum Posts=
 * AI program solves Connect Four by Victor Allis, rec.games.programmer, October 16, 1988
 * Connect-4 by Mark Kern, rec.games.programmer, February 25, 1990
 * mate detetion issue by Mike Adams, CCC, October 24, 2008 » Checkmate
 * Connect 4 AlphaZero implemented using Python... by Steve Maughan, CCC, January 29, 2018 » AlphaZero, Python

=External Links=
 * Connect Four from Wikipedia
 * Connect Four - Wikibooks
 * Connect Four by James D. Allen
 * John's Connect Four Playground by John Tromp
 * Solving Connect 4: how to build a perfect AI by Pascal Pons
 * Connect Four Solver


 * The Rules of The Captain's Mistress
 * Connect Four - Slides (pdf) MIT, March 9, 2010
 * How to build your own AlphaZero AI using Python and Keras by David Foster, January 26, 2018 » AlphaZero, Python
 * Connect 4 Game | Toys for Kids from Hasbro Official Website | Hasbro Toys
 * Connect Four - Numberphile by Brady Haran, December 01, 2013, YouTube Video

=References=

Up one Level