Ai assisted player for a two-player-game

Here the game is Oware.
This project has been realized during an AI Game Programming course, by Antoine Cousson and myself.

The game:

Oware is a zero-sum african game.
It is originally played on a 12 holes board, 6 by 6 and with 4 seeds by hole.

The rules:

• When you play a hole you take all seeds in it.
• The sowing is determine at the beginning as clockwise or anti-clockwise.
• During the sowing, you put one seed into each following the one you start from.
• If you have enough seeds to return to your starting hole, you don't sow it.
• If the last hole you sow contains 2 or 3 seeds after you sow it, you take the seeds in it.
  Then if the precedent as the same situation, 2 or 3 seeds you take his seeds as weel and you go until you find
  a hole that does not match the requirement.
• Game stops when one of the player have more than half the seeds or when one is starved.

The project:

The project was to develop an AI assisted player for a modified version of Oware.

The player:

• The algorithm is an Minimax with Alpha-Beta pruning.
• The basic evaluation function was the difference in score between players.
• The evaluation is always based one the first player.

New rules:

• The board is a 16 holes board, 8 by 8.
• Player one got the odd holes.
• Player two got the even holes.
• There are two colours of seeds, blue and red. There are 2 of both colours in each holes at the beginning.
• Blue seeds can be sow only in opponent holes.
• Red seeds can be sow in all holes.
• When you play a hole you only play one colour, blue or red.
• Game stops when one of the player have more than half the seeds or when one is starved
  or when there's less than 8 seeds remaining on the board.
• If starving and less than 8 happens at the same time, starving is prior.