Zillions of Games is a program for the PC, running under Windows'95, Windows'98, and Windows NT, which enables the user to play a large number of different board games.
The program is delivered by more than 200 different games that can be played (if we count variants of games separately), but the nicest aspect of this program is that it is possible to let it play new games. Hereto, the programmers made a new `programming' language, which can be seen as form of the language LISP (probably the most popular programming language for researchers in Artificial Intelligence). In this programming language, one can program out how the rules of the game. More specifically, the user should define what is the board layout, what is the opening setup, what moves are possible, and what are the winning conditions. In addition, the user can give background information to be shown under the help menu, define sounds to be played or animations to be shown, etc. The user does not have to worry about making the AI - with a clever mechanism, once one has made the Zillions Rules File (or, in short, zrf-file), the Zillions of Games program itself takes care of making the AI. Thus, with relatively little effort, one can make the Zillions of Games program play lots and lots of different games.
To play a home made game, all one needs to do is to double-click on the zrf-file (e.g., in explorer), and the program runs.
Also, you can play games over the internet. David Howe and I tried this out, and we played the first two trans-atlantic games of Knight-Tac-Toe. (David won both games), and then played the one and a half millennium old Shatranj over the Internet. This went very smoothly. Setting up a game with Zillions of Games of one of the games that it plays is very easy, although it seems not possible to look on the internet whether there are others that want to play to you: you must make an appointment with someone else in a different manner, e.g., by email.
I found the capability to play over the internet very exiting and pleasant. In addition, the game can also be played over other kinds of networks, but I did not try that out.
For some games however, the engine seems not so strong, especially for multi-move games, like progressive chess. Games where Zillions appears to be very strong include small chess variants. A typical game where Zillions is good is a game like Flip chess.
But also, if you do not have the possibility to make your own zrf-files, the program still will be quite nice, I think, as it allows you to play many different board games. In addition to those offered with the program, new ones are appearing regularly on the Internet.
It would be nice to have some tools that allow users to make zrf-files with less effort, e.g., some kind of wizard that allows one to specify chess variants of a certain type. Something for version 2?
The language has its limitations. Using randomization is doable, but its implementation is not very elegant. A feature in the language that is also dearly missed is the use of some kind of arithmetic. It would be nice to have at least some kind of integer arithmetic. Other limitations include the inability to have information hidden for some players, but I think that a good engine that also can handle that needs another AI-breakthrough.
The above was authored by: Hans L. Bodlaender.
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Created on: January 04, 2001. Last modified on: January 04, 2001.
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