Program Info
Four Wins 2.1 is a little strategy game played by one player against the computer or by two players
against each other (which doesn't make too much sense in my opinion). The subject of the game is
to form a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line of four coins. The coins are put into one of the seven
slots by the two players alternately. If you already know Connect Four: the rules are the same, only
the name is different...
I wrote the program to create a computer player that defeats me. Finally it did and I hope it does defeat
others too ;)
So I hope there will be someone who downloads the program and enjoys playing...
Systems Requirements
The program runs under Windows 95/NT® and does not have any special requirements with
respect to memory, processor type (as long as it's a 32bit x86) or graphics card. So you
need the same hardware as you do for running Windows®:
- 386 processor or better
- about 8MB memory or more (Four Wins itself needs at most 0.5MB)
- about 1MB harddisk space left
- Windows 95/NT®
- optionally Four Wins supports a sound card
Nevertheless the faster your computer the better the computer will play at a specified
difficulty level.
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Download FourWins
It's pretty simple to get Four Wins 2.1. Once you have downloaded the setup program by clicking on the
download button below, start the setup program and Four Wins will be installed on your computer.
Run Four Wins by selecting it from your start menu.
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Legal Stuff
Four Wins is freeware. That means you can distribute and use Four Wins as long as you:
- do not change the distribution file or any part of it
- do not use it for commercial purposes or 'earning money' in general
- do not reengineer or disassemble any part of the program
- do not change the way of distribution
- do not distribute any part of the installed program
Anyway, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email
to tell us your opinion about Four Wins and what should be improved.
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Program Details
I played the 'real world' Four Wins (also known as Connect Four) for some time and it
suddenly came to my mind, that I could write a computer player for this game. So I wrote
one and it did always loose even if given some minutes to 'think'. A little bit frustrated I
stopped working on this.
A year later I began once more to think about the computer player and designed
something that could defeat a human player. So I continued on working on the computer
player and improved the evaluation and the search function in a manner that I got problems
winning against the computer.
At this time I began optimizing the code for speed using assembler routines, hash tables
and all that stuff and could increase the execution speed by about 700 percent! By now
the search engine consists of a 32bit assembler evaluation function, an 'opening library'
and a min-max search function with an alpha-beta-cutoff, quiescence search and
so kind of transposition table.
On my pretty old computer (486DX33 8MB) it evaluates 6500 positions per second and
completes a benchmark in about 10 seconds (you may start the benchmark yourself by
pressing Ctrl+B). Just for comparision: On a P166MMX 16MB it finishes the benchmark
after 0.8 seconds and does about 64000 evaluations per second.
May be, you wrote a similar program? In that case I would be glad about some comments
or hints on how to make the program play better (email).
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