This is a C++ framework for working with the game of Binary Homeworlds,
a two-player game of strategy and tactics that might aptly be described
as "space chess".  Homeworlds is normally played with a set of Icehouse
pieces in four colors, and without a board; the pieces shift on and off
the table during the game to represent star systems and spaceships.
The goal of the game is to eliminate all of the ships defending your
enemy's homeworld: by moving in a larger ship to capture them, by
sending in fleets of the appropriate colors to catastrophe them, or by
sending in those fleets to catastrophe the enemy's binary star system
itself.

This project consists of four main components:

 - Portable C++ code for a command-line-driven game analyzer, "annotate".
   The analyzer includes a very simple AI (nothing more than an
   evaluation function and a simple sanity filter to avoid moving
   directly into check), so it can be used to play games against the
   computer. This code is in the core-src/ directory.

 - Portable C++ code (using the wxWidgets library) for a GUI analog
   to "annotate", named "wxgui". This is a work in progress. Eventually
   I hope to give it all the functionality of "annotate", plus nice
   graphics.  This code is in the wxgui-src/ directory.

 - Regression tests for the analyzer. Tests beginning "win-" are
   endgame positions from which there is a winning move; tests beginning
   "nowin-" are endgame positions from which there is no winning move.
   Some tests hinge upon very obscure points in the rules, such as
   sacrificing a ship in order to build it later in the same turn,
   or sacrificing a homeworld's last defender.  These tests are in
   the tests/ directory.

 - A partial mirror of the SuperDuperGames.org game archive, containing
   over 700 game transcripts to date. Includes a Perl script to translate
   the archive games from SDG's format into the format expected by
   "annotate".  These transcripts are in the superdupergames-archive/
   directory.

The contents of this repository are licensed by Arthur O'Dwyer under
the Creative Commons BSD License, with the following two restrictions:

 - The transcripts in the superdupergames-archive/ directory are not
   mine to copyright. I guess technically their copyright belongs to
   the players in each individual game. (If you see anything in that
   directory that you think ought to be removed for privacy reasons,
   let me know.)

 - If you use any of this source code in writing an AI or "bot" and
   then use that bot to play games via email or on a server somewhere,
   your bot must include the string "Bot" in its username. This
   license condition is pretty much intended to prevent people from
   "cheating" on SuperDuperGames. (However, I would hope that anyone
   smart enough to write a decent Homeworlds player wouldn't really
   do anything dubious with it. And the AI on "annotate" at the moment
   is much weaker than even a weak human player.)

Do you know how to make the wxWidgets GUI look better? Please submit
a patch! If you don't want to deal with the GitHub overhead, you can
send me an email or even try PM'ing me on BoardGameGeek with suggestions.

Do you think you can make a better AI? Again, please submit a patch!
I know the current AI is very weak. One hurdle is that it's not always
feasible to look more than one move ahead, unless you can figure out
how to prune bad moves. Homeworlds has a much higher branching factor
than either chess or go. Another hurdle is that my internal representations
of game states and actions are fairly verbose and hard to manipulate
(in terms of CPU cycles). One thing on my roadmap for the near future
is a multi-threaded game tree search based on OpenMP.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14634/homeworlds
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/Games/ILoveHomeworlds.html
http://superdupergames.org/main.html
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BSD/

(This project is not affiliated with either SuperDuperGames.org
or BoardGameGeek.com.)