Has anyone tried to do a computer search for a forced win for either side on a 6x6 board (the players have 2 x 4 pieces each)? It seems like a fun little game.

sorry for the huge bump (almost two year old topic…)

I myself have wondered about this. I am not an accomplished enough programmer to do this myself, but a 6x6 board seems to offer some interesting possibilities, and a computer simulation could show us if this variant is worthwhile or not. Given the way I understand programs like MIA to be programmed, it seems like it would be fairly easy to modify for a different board size.

However, the person moving first probably has a big advantage, so perhaps the pie rule could be implemented? Also, 6x6 probably doesn't offer as much strategic depth. Maybe something like 10x10 could also be looked at.

Maybe some other players have thoughts on this? Again, sorry for the resurrection of this dead topic.

MIA distributed as GameMaster Beta has the possibility of changing the board size for 4x4 (quite obvious first player win) 6x6, 8x8 10x10 12x12 14x14 and 16x16.

The reason for even size of the edge is probably some symmetry issues :-)

Solving 6x6 seems an interesting challenge. The complexity is beyond the trivial methods. I tried running the search even after some captures and it didn't finish in short time.

I counted that number of positions on 5x5 board would fit in 100GB memory hence it is possible to do the full search on a PC probably.

For 6x6 one can probably store all positions with at most 10 pieces and try some capturing strategy to enforce win. Thats how some checker variants were weakly solved. But it doesn't have to succeed given the captures in LOA are not that obviously advantageous.

http://www.personeel.unimaas.nl/m-winands/documents/LoaNote.pdf