#Pilgrim

Pilgrim is an AI engine for Creeper, an abstract strategy game by Graham's Games. It began as an attempt to give some AI testers for Harding University's senior computer science capstone class an opponent to play against in preparing to play the student projects.

###Algorithm

Pilgrim is based on MCTS-Solver, a refinement of Monte-Carlo Tree Search, which itself is an application of the Monte Carlo method to game playing. For more information on MCTS, see this excellent overview.

###Status

Pilgrim currently plays a decent game at a beginning-intermediate level, but struggles with providing a truly challenging game. There are several algorithm parameters that could be tweaked to potentially increase playing strength, and there are featuers of the algorithm implementation that could be improved.

###Building and running

Pilgrim is written in C. Tkreeper, a rough GUI, is written in Python 2. If you don't have Python, get it from the Python website. The latest version of Python 2 (not Python 3) should work.

Please let me know if you have any problems building or running.

The algorithm parameters in src/think.h are of interest. Tweaking these could potentially improve playing strength, perhaps significantly.

###Tkreeper

Pilgrim is bundled with Tkreeper, a rough GUI board. Its purpose is to provide a simple way to play against the engine. It was implemented very quickly, and its code is in a pretty messy state. With a cleanup and some fleshing out, it could provide a complete GUI board.

###Other notes

This was my first real pure C project. I'd welcome any advice on idiomatic or effective C programming.