Gobblet game from the point of artificial intelligence

Gobblet is a new abstract board game, rules of which are based on the classic 4-in-arow game played on 4×4 board. However, the ability to gobble up and move the pieces on the board greatly increases its complexity and Gobblet is thus comparable to games like Checkers or Othello. That makes it interesting from the artificial intelligence point of view. This thesis explores the possibilities of classic and more recent methods for searching the Gobblet game tree - the minimax algorithm, alpha-beta pruning, a heuristic for move ordering, iterative deepening and others. The resulting algorithm is compared to the computer players on the Boardspace game server where it plays above-average with the best-playing robot. Implementation of all described algorithms and a graphical user interface for testing them in the Java programming language is an inseparable part of this thesis