The 2011 computer games olympiad will be held in Tilburg, The Netherlands, from November the 18-26: http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/icga/event.php?id=43 . Castro, Lajkonik and Wanderer will be there competing in Havannah, and several programs will be competing in Hex, including at least Wolve and Mohex.
I invite anyone with a program to join the tournament. I also invite anyone who just likes to play to drop by. I'm happy to grab a coffee/beer/food, play some Havannah, and talk about games, strategies or heuristics.
I'm planning to release the code for Castro as open source after the tournament, and am happy to discuss the code or usage as well. Hopefully this can encourage more people to try out new ideas.
Tilburg 2011 - Havannah. Left to right: Timo Ewalds; Marcin Ciura; Ton van der Valk; Lukasz Lew; Richard Lorentz; Ingo Althofer.
Castro won the tournament between the bots. Ton won base-8, white and black, against both Castro en Lajkonik, while Richard and Wanderer had already left.
IMHO, only the base-5 games from the olympiad are interesting. The base-8 games played in the tournament were below the level the bots present on LG. But the Castro+Lajkonik base-8 games against Ton are perhaps worth showing (in case the bots disagreed, Timo and me were deciding whose move to make).
I am ending with a shameless plug: since we are all interested in making Havannah more popular, I have created a Google+ page for it: https://plus.google.com/105607364226084069219/posts. If you have a G+ account, you can add it to your circles. My dream is to bring the scattered Havannah subcommunities together. I plan to post Havannah news there, in particular some games from the olympiad.
No, I asked Ton to do the honors and take some pictures. He's a better player. As far as any contribution on my part to the field of AI programming was presumed, I regret to say there is none :)
Little Golem