Hey guys,above's videos were posted recently on Numberphile's youtube channel. Numberphile is a team of mathematicans who try to teach about all kinds of mathematical phenomenons and these videos explain the basics to Dots and Boxes including chain-rule and doublecross-strategy; they feature Elwyn R. Berlekamp who is known for his books "the Dots and Boxes game: Sophisticated child's play" and "Winning Ways". Please check out the videos if you haven't been concerned with Dots and Boxes yet; Numberphile and Berlekamp are really awesome, Dots and Boxes really fascinating and I'd be very happy if this could bring us some more players to compete with :).
Yes, 9 boxes has been solved for a long time (although for quite a while before that it was merely proved to be a player 2 win, and assumed to be a 5-4 win, instead of proven to be a 6-3 win for player 2).
16 boxes was proved to be an 8-8 tie by David Wilson in 2001 (I think he may have been the one to discover and prove the 6-3 win, too).
My bot, The_Shark_C, proved 25 boxes to be a 13-12 about a year ago.
I'm pretty sure that 36 boxes won't be solved in my lifetime....
Sadly, I have not been able to work much on it. I have not been running any analysis, because my hard drive is essentially full (10.8 of 12 TB -- and is currently not backed up, because one of my raid arrays failed).
Top priorities:
1. Creating a backup of the data.
2. Getting the Little Golem interface working again.
Little Golem